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discovery that he was descended from a monkey. Instead oi 

 sympathizing with the views of this unhappy victim of prejudice 

 and folly, I fully echo the sentiment of the naturalist who said 

 that he would prefer being descended from a good honest 

 monkey, to being obliged to avow himself the offspring of cer- 

 tain fanatical enemies of scientific knowledge and progress. 



Besides, I can console myself with the thought that whatever 

 may have been the remote origin of man, for ages he possesses a 

 history of his own ; he has filled the world with monuments of 

 his ambition and of his genius ; he is the sole actor in a drama 

 where other animal beings play only an accessory part. The 

 embalmed records of three thousand years, the figures of animals 

 and birds engraved upon the ancient Egyptian monuments, 

 show that there has been no beginning of a transition of species 

 during the long period of thirty centuries. Throw in, if you 

 will, a few hundreds of millions of years, and snatch from us our 

 titles of nobility, and claim the possibility of our descent from an 

 anthropoid ape, and I even then maintain that man^s dignity is 

 not necessarily lowered, his position in the scale of creation is 

 not altered ; I should still cheer myself with the eloquent lan- 

 guage of Sedgwick : " Man stands by himself, the despotic lord 

 of the living world ; not so great in organic strength as many of 

 the despots that went before him on Nature^s chronicle, but 

 raised far above them all by a higher development of brain ; by 

 a frame- work that fits him for the operations of mechanical skill ; 

 by superadded reason ; by a special instinct for combination ; 

 by a prescience that tells him to act prospectively ; by a con- 

 science that makes him amenable to law ; by conceptions that 

 transcend the narrow limits of reason ; by hopes that have no 

 full fruition here; by inborn capacity of rising from individual 

 facts to the apprehension of general laws ; by a conception of a 

 cause for all the phenomena of sense; and by a consequent 

 belief in a God of Nature.^^ 



I see nothing in the doctrine of evolution, as applied to the 

 origin of man, that is inconsistent with Natural E/Cligion. We 

 know that in intra-uterine life we pass through a preparatory 

 stage which we can but imperfectly realize and understand, and 

 therefore we can readily admit that the Creator, if He had chosen, 

 could have endowed us with a previous existence in the form of 

 a less perfect animal than man ; I say, the Darwinian hypothesis 

 of the origin of man is not inconsistent with Natural Religion, 

 but it is directly opposed to Revealed Religion, which tells us that 



God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into 

 his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.^' 

 I regard, with Archdeacon Pratt, ^' the six days of the creation as 

 exhibiting a series of creative acts, which terminated in the 



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