VII EVOLUTION ONLY A PROCESS 99 



considerations are applicable. Believe everything you will about 

 man in his highest intellectual and moral development, about the 

 nature, origin, existence, and destiny of the human soul; you 

 have long been able to reconcile all this with the knowledge of 

 his individual material origin according to law, in no whit 

 different in principle from that of the beasts of the field, passing 

 through all the phases they go through, and existing long 

 before possessing, except potentially, any of the special attributes 

 of humanity. At what exact period, and by what means, the 

 great transformation takes place, no one can tell. If the 

 most godlike of men have passed through the stages which 

 physiologists recognise in human development without prejudice 

 to the noblest, highest, most divine part of their nature, why 

 should not the race of mankind, as a whole, have had a similar 

 origin, followed by similar progress and development, equally with- 

 out prejudice to its present condition and future destiny? Can 

 it be of real consequence at the present time, either to our faith or 

 our practice, whether the first man had such an extremely lowly 

 beginning as the dust of the earth, in the literal sense of the 

 words, or whether he was formed through the intervention of 

 various progressive stages of animal life ? The reign of order 

 and law in the government of the world has been so far admitted 

 that all these questions have really become questions of a little 

 more or a little less order and law. Science may well be left to 

 work out the details as it may ; it has thrown some light, little 

 enough at present, but ever increasing, and for which we should 

 all be thankful, upon the processes or methods by which the 

 world in which we dwell has been brought into its present 

 condition. The wonder and mystery of creation remains as 

 wonderful and mysterious as before. Of the origin of the whole, 

 science tells us nothing. It is still as impossible as ever to 

 conceive that such a world, governed by laws, the operation of 

 which have led to such mighty results, and are attended by such 

 future promise, could have originated without the intervention of 

 some power external to itself. If the succession of small miracles, 

 formerly supposed to regulate the operations of nature, no longer 

 satisfies us, have we not substituted for them one of immeasurable 

 greatness and grandeur ? 



