THE SUMMIT OF THE YEARS 



and stones beside him. Until man appeared with 

 his endowment of reason, his moral consciousness, 

 the earth was a mere menagerie of bhnd savage 

 forces. Hundreds of millions of years of mere 

 growth and decay, birth and death, struggle and 

 slaughter, building up and tearing down, submer- 

 gence and elevation, erosion and denudation, sculp- 

 turing and shifting of land-forms; the rise and ex- 

 tinction and slow evolution — oh, so slow ! — of 

 animal forms. Millions of years of corals and 

 trilobites, millions of years of moUusks and fishes, 

 millions of years of reptiles and amphibians, ages of 

 gigantic mammals, ages of quadrumana, before man 

 appears: then ages of rude savage life before the 

 dawn of civilization. If the Creator was aiming at 

 man all these long geologic ages, groping his way 

 through these low, and then through these gigantic 

 repellent forms, how blindly and indifferently He 

 seems to have worked ! 



Yet through this hit-and-miss method of Nature, 

 things have come to what they are; life has come to 

 what we behold it; the trees and the plants are in 

 their places; the animals are adjusted to their envi- 

 ronments; the seeds are sown, fruits ripen, the rains 

 come, the weather system is established, and the 

 vast and complex machinery of the life of the globe 

 runs more or less smoothly, undirected, in the 

 human sense. Blind groping, experimenting, re- 

 gardless of waste, regardless of pain, regardless of 

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