powers of nature are made by a power above them, to bring forth higher products characterized by wisdom, by skill, and by taste. Your believer in mere Natural Law and Natural Selection has seen only half the truth, or rather he has not seen half the truth. Like one of those insects which he may have been microscopically examining, he has seen only the smallest objects. Mole-like, he has been burrowing a dark and confined tunnel through the underground clay, instead of walking upright like a man, and looking around him on the extended earth, and up into the expanse of heaven. He has used the microscope and seen the infinitely little; but he refuses to look through the telescope, which shows him how the littles are formed into structures of infinite greatness and grandeur. All, no doubt, proceeds from natural laws; but these are made to work out typical forms, geometrically correct and æsthetically beautiful. The cold winter gives us frost-work, and the warm summer yields us flowers; and contemporaneously there appear intellect and taste to measure and appreciate it. The blind forces are made by One who has eyes to evolve ideas, patterns, exemplars, which perceiving minds are constructed to behold and admire. Finally, above the physical, above the intellectual even, there rises the moral, like stars out of the star dust, or rather like stars rising out of these other stars, only brighter, purer, and more enduring. At the point to which we have come, a new progression is opening to us in an endless vista.

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Darwin has caught an important fact, when he says that there is a principle of Natural Selection in nature the strong live and multiply and increase; while the weak die, give way, and disappear. This is certainly a law of the plants and of the lower animals. It looks in the earlier periods of human history as if this law were still the ruling one, as if bodily strength and brute force were to subdue the weak and hold them in subjection. The first empires the Egyptian, the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Persian were very much founded on this principle. And is this to go on for ever, the powerful tyrannizing over the feeble, men making women do all the menial work, and the great body of the people, even in such civilized countries as Greece and Rome, slaves to the few? In the progression of events, there appear clear proofs that the old law is to give way before a higher to which it is subordinated. There are indications that intelligence is to prevail over unreasoning force. Nations of the highest mental power and cultivation, such as the Greeks and Romans, begin to take the lead, and rule by forethought, by counsel, by firm government.

As we advance, we see a new, a still more important law emerging, and urging its claim not only to a place, but a supreme place, declaring that right is above might, that moral good is higher even than intellectual strength. A people with high intelligence may become pleasure-loving, sensual, as the Greeks did in their great commercial cities; may

become selfish, cruel, dissolute, as the Romans did

in the decline of their empire, — and a hardier and a more moral race comes in like a fresh, cool breeze to fill up the heated and relaxing atmosphere. Not that the law of the prevalence of strength is absolutely set aside, but it is subordinated to a higher law, or rather higher laws, which limit and restrain it, and may be made to direct and to elevate it. The intellectual rises above the physical, and asserts its right to govern it, even as the soul claims to rule over the body. But there is more: the moral rises above the intellectual, and claims that the understanding should be obedient to it, even as the conscience, which is the law in the heart, declares that it should rule over the head, and over the whole man. Nay, the very moral ideas and sentiments make progress by purification and refinement: an earthly morality like that of Jacob is made to flame into the love of John; and the rigid prohibitions of the commandments, written on stone, become the blessings of the discourses of Jesus, meant to be written on the fleshly tables of the heart.

The Law of Natural Selection that, in the exuberance of seeds and organisms and species, in early nature the stronger should prevail—is in itself a beneficent one. "All changes of form or structure, all increase in the size of an organ or its complexity, all greater specialization or physiological division of labor, can only be brought about, inasmuch as it is for the good of the being so modified."* It

*Wallace on Natural Selection.

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allows the weak, after enjoying their brief time of existence, to die and disappear; while the vigorous leave behind a still stronger progeny to rise to a fuller development and intenser enjoyments. But there are stringent limits set to this law. It is, after all, the law of the period of the unconscious plant and irrational brute. It comes to be subordinated to a higher, and this to a still higher. Intellect comes later; but, like the more recent geological formations, it mounts the highest, and overlies and overlooks all the rest. Thought gains, and it retains, the highest positions; the giants disappear, and the civilized peoples take their place; the Canaanites, with their chariots of iron, are conquered by men who carry with them a higher mission; the walls of Jericho fall down before the blowing of trumpets sounding truth to all people. The forests are cut down to let the fields yield corn and wheat, and barley and vines, and figs and olives; and trees are left only for shelter and for lawn ornaments. The creatures with stings and claws and fangs - the foxes, the wolves, the leopards- give way before sheep and horses and kine. There is still a struggle for existence, but the skill which devises means and invents instruments prevails over brute force and fierceness. And this power of understanding is destined to be sublimed into something nobler and more ethereal. Above the dead earth and agitated sea there is to rise an atmosphere in which the living are to breathe and move and fly. The intellectual era seems to culminate in Greece in the days

of Pericles, when free thought and art and literature have reached their zenith. But in that very age, a new and a vastly greater power comes into view. Socrates is defeated, and yet Socrates conquers. He drinks the hemlock, and dies; but it is in the hope of an immortality. His body is burned; but the flame by which this was effected, a new correlated force, is never to be extinguished. His persecutors are forgotten, or remembered only to be execrated; but the moral power of Socrates still walks our earth. A new struggle for existence has begun. It was exhibited and symbolized at Thermopyla, where the power of numbers was met and defeated by the heroism of a devoted few. It was an anticipation of what was to come.

But there were better prefigurations of it among a people specially called and set apart for the purpose; in an enslaved race, trained to become the depositaries of the truth, and in due time the missionaries of the world; in the law delivered first, as if to suit the ages of giant strength, amid thunders and lightnings and tempest, and the voice of the trumpet waxing louder and louder, and then coming forth from the gentle lips of Jesus; first in the strong wind, the earthquake, and the fire, followed by the still, small voice, which is specially the voice of God as heard in the later prophets, and still more sweetly in the discourses of Him who spake as never man spake. In due time the types, the bloody sacrifices, the whole burntofferings, culminate in an archetype, in which we