ambiguities and inconsistencies. We are obliged to dissent from some of the latter doctrines of his scheme, or to confess that we cannot understand them. But even here it is possible that his views may be interpreted in the light of God's immanence in nature and in man, and be found to have in them less of paradox and more of truth than some of his critics have imagined.

He was himself a man of tolerant mind, and while he claimed the right to think for himself, he granted the same right to others. He was a genuine Baptist, in that he believed in soul-liberty, and he never thought the true interests of the Church of Christ could be subserved by withholding from any of its members the right of private judgment. His soul was stirred as by the sound of a trumpet whenever it was proposed to cast out of our ecclesiastical or Christian fellowship those who differed from us only in matters doubtful or unimportant. And so I give to him, what he freely gave to others—the recognition of his loftiness of mind, of his sincerity, of his eagerness to know the truth, of his bold advocacy of what he believed, even in the face and teeth of opposition. He has raised up a generation of thinkers and preachers who believe in manliness in the ministry. He has left behind him a body of divinity as stimulating and suggestive as any that had been written in America since Jonathan Edwards' day, and fully worthy to be classed with the works of Charles Hodge and of Henry B. Smith. All of his opinions are worthy of study, and many of them may yet prove the germs of progress in theology. May we who succeed him have

something of his spirit, follow him where he followed Christ, improve upon his teaching where we can, do honest and independent work, as he did, in the building up of the fair and symmetrical structure of Christian truth! He was one who lived in and for his pupils; he cast his bread upon the waters, expecting that it would return to him only after many days; he did the sowing, and it has been ours to reap the fruit of his labors. God grant that we may all attain unto the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, and may enter at last, as he has done, into the presence of the great Teacher, where he who sowed. and they who reaped shall rejoice together!

THE past half-century has been distinguished by the apparent triumph of the doctrine of evolution. The most conservative are now willing to grant that the present is built upon the past, and is in some sense a development from that past. The only controversy now is between those who interpret evolution as a blind movement and those who interpret it as a movement of intelligence. Charles Darwin acknowledged that natural selection could not account either for origins or for progress. It explains the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest. It can give no guarantee that the lower shall be followed by the higher; on the other hand, the lower may still deteriorate and may even become extinct-in fact, deterioration or extinction has been the fate of nine-tenths of the species of the past.

Progress requires something more than adaptation to environment. Increase of brute force may adapt a species to its environment, while this increase only operates to degrade, if we measure the result by any intellectual or moral standard. We can never know what is the fittest, whether brute force or mental gifts, until we judge evolution in its relation to man. Because man is the most complex object in the universe,

1 An essay read before the Alpha Chi Club, December 12, 1907. ΠΙΟ

we estimate all the lower orders by the greater or less complexity of their organization. Increasing differentiation of function is one great mark of progress, only because it brings life nearer to its culmination in man. Atrophy of organs marks degeneration, unless it is accompanied by advancing intelligence. But this is only to say that progressive evolution cannot be blind. Evolution is only a method. If it is to lead to useful ends, it must be the method of a wise and designing mind. An unteleological evolution is an irrational process, even if it is not a contradiction in terms.

When we consider the evolution of man, we need to remember that he is not a mere compound of mechanical forces, but is an agent, capable of resisting and thwarting the benevolent design with which he has been created. Man's history has not been one of uniformly upward progress. The privilege of going down to hell is not confined to the lower orders of creation. Man too has had his periods of retrogression and decay. Man is the only animal that fails to realize the end of its being, and this for the reason that he has the highest endowment of all-the endowment of free will. Ignoring this fact of man's constitution, anthropologists have too often regarded the most brutal conditions as indicative of man's original state, whereas they should be regarded as evidences of degeneration. My aim at present is to show that this latter explanation is not only scientifically possible, but that the facts render it much the more probable. I claim that, while progressive evolution is the method of an immanent divine will, there is an incidental retrogressive evolution which profoundly modifies the former, and which results

from a perverse human will. Civilization advances in spite of opposition; the stream has many a backset, temporary though the backset may be; degeneration is as plain as is progress; man mars God's work, even though God overrules the evil for good.

Those who hold to an unteleological evolution, by which I mean an evolution in which progress is an accident and not the result of design, are inclined to. deny that brutal conditions among mankind are evidence of degeneration from an earlier and better state. They hold, on the contrary, to an originally savage condition of mankind, and to a continuous upward progress since that time. In order to estimate their theory at its proper value, it is necessary sharply to distinguish between savagery and mere childhood. The biblical account of man's first state represents him as a child, but it never represents him as a savage. He is without clothing, but up to the time of his transgression he is without fear. He is lord of nature and keeper of the garden. He names the lower animals. and has them in subjection, even though he is still ignorant of the metals and has no instrument of music. He has a moral sense which can be appealed to, and he enjoys at least occasional intercourse with his Maker. He is undeveloped, but he has right intuitions and inclinations, and he is free to choose between good and evil.

What now is savagery? A distinguished citizen of Rochester, Mr. Lewis H. Morgan, has given us the most definite and exhaustive answer. He divided human progress into three great periods-the savage, the barbarian, and the civilized. Each of the two