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 Religion. 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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