CHAPTER XIV.

UNIVERSALITY OF EVOLUTION-ASCENT OF MAN FROM LOWER FORMS THE SOUL DEVELOPED BY HEREDITY AND PRENATAL INFLUENCES-ILLUSTRATION AND DEMONSTRATION OF THE FACT THE SOURCE OF CHRIST'S SOUL POWER.

THE

THE universality of Evolution is today acknowledged by scientists and theologians alike. No intelligent man denies it. Yet in the third quarter of the nineteenth century theologians could hardly find language severe enough to denounce the scientists. who ventured to declare and to demonstrate that man is a product of Evolution, and that his ancestors were at one time the lowest forms of life upon earth. In his work on "The Ascent of Man" Professor Henry Drummond says of Evolution in general:

The last romance of Science, the most daring it has ever tried to pen, is the Story of the Ascent of Man. Withheld from all the wistful eyes that have gone before, whose reverent ignorance forbade their wisest minds to ask to see it, this Final volume of Natural History has begun to open with our century's close. In the monographs of His and Minot, the Embryology of Man has already received a just expression; Darwin and Haeckel have traced the origin of the Animal-Body; the researches of Romanes mark a beginning with the Evolution of Mind; Herbert Spencer has elaborated theories of the development of Morals; Edward Caird of the Evolution of Religion. * * *

Every step in the proof of the oneness in a universal evolutionary process of this divine humanity of ours is a step in the proof of the divinity of all lower things. And what is of infinitely

* *

greater moment, each footprint discovered in the Ascent of Man is a guide to the step to be taken next. Hence this is not only the noblest problem which Science can ever study, but the practical bearings of this theme are great beyond any other on the roll of knowledge.

Now that the first rash rush of the evolutionary invasion is past, and the sins of its youth atoned for by sober concession, Evolution is seen to be neither more nor less than the story of creation as told by those who know it best.

Mr. Darwin set forth as the clue to the principle by which advancement has resulted in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, the theory of the Struggle for Life. Professor Drummond proposes a second factor which plays an equally prominent part, the Struggle for the Life of Others. He says:

The functions discharged by all living things, plant and animal, are two in number. The first is nutrition, the second is reproduction. The first is the basis of the struggle for the life, the second of the struggle for the life of others. These two functions run their parallel course-or their spiral course, for they continuously intertwine-from the very dawn of life. They are involved in the fundamental nature of protoplasm itself. They affect the entire round of life; they determine the whole morphology of living things; in a sense they are life.

The question of why Evolution was chosen as the method of development in the spiritual and material universe is interesting, but not important. As to its character, Mr. Darwin, in closing his work on "The Origin of Species,” said:

There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms, or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on, according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Perhaps Evolution was chosen because Infinite wisdom perceived it to be the best method of develop

ing material and physical individualities. Or it may be that the Being whom we consider Infinite is in fact restricted in his powers, and could not, if he should choose to make the effort, create Man by any other means. But without assuming to give a positive answer to the question, Why was Evolution adopted? we can say positively that it was adopted and carried out by Natural Selection up to a certain point, and then that method of development ceased. That point was Man. With his advent upon the earth, and his development into a civilized being, natural selection among the higher order of animals ended, and Man became the arbiter of Evolution.

The physical body of man is a structure made up of millions of cells, and the history of the unborn babe is that of a single cell at the outset, to which are added cell after cell and organ after organ. Professor Drummond says:

The embryo of the future man begins life, like the primitive savage, in a one-roomed hut, a single, simple cell. This cell is round and almost microscopic in size. When fully formed it measures only one-tenth of a line diameter, and with the naked eye can be barely discerned as a very fine point. An outer covering, transparent as glass, surrounds this little sphere, and in the interior, embedded in protoplasm, lies a bright, globular spot. In form, in size, in composition there is no apparent difference between this human cell and that of any other mammal. The dog, the elephant, the lion, the ape, and a thousand others begin their widely different lives in a house the same as Man's. At an earlier stage, indeed, before it has taken on its pellucid covering, this cell has affinities still more astonishing. For at that remoter period the earlier forms of living things, both plant and animal, are one. It is one of the most astounding things of modern science that the first embryotic abodes of moss and fern and pine, of shark and crab and coral

polyp, of lizard, leopard, monkey and Man are so exactly similar that the highest powers of mind and microscope fail to trace the smallest distinction between them.

It is also demonstrated that the development of man from the embryo exhibits all the successive stages of evolution, and that the adult body has in it the relics of many organs possessed by the lower ancestors of Man, but useless to him. One of these is the dangerous vermiform appendix. Various malforma

tions which appear in individuals are also the recurrence of natural formations in lower ancestors. Clubfoot, for example, is simply gorilla-foot.

In Man, Professor Drummond holds, Evolution has reached a terminal point. Man is not only the highest branch of animal life and development, but the highest possible branch. This he illustrates by citation of anatomical facts, especially the form of the cranial cavity.

Thus it is demonstrated that the physical body of Man has developed from the simplest form of protoplasmic life to the wonderful machine we now find it to be, with the power to reproduce itself in the order of nature. And still the development of every human individual begins with a single cell which is indistinguishable from that in which the lower forms of individual life have their origin.

And so it is with the soul of Man. It begins its draft upon the Infinite in the same simple way that lower forms of life begin theirs; but with a potency of development given it by the evolutionary processes through which its ancestors have passed possessed by the individuality of no other organized being upon the earth.

Demonstration of the premise that "the soul is molded into the physical body according to mental and physical conditions and circumstances” lies in the facts of heredity and prenatal influences.

First, as to heredity. No argument is necessary, nor need any evidence be cited, to prove that children inherit the mental and physical characteristics of their parents. All know this to be true. The physical body is shaped by inheritance from the parents, and the physical mind, which is the soul acting through the physical organism, is also shaped by inheritance.

But of vastly more importance than simple inheritance of the mental and physical characteristics of parents is the influence of the mental condition of both parents at the period of conception, and the thought and mental condition of the mother during the period of gestation. I quote from Dr. Sidney Barrington Elliott's convincing papers on “Prenatal Influence," published in the Arena magazine for March and August, 1894. He says:

Heredity is that law by which permanent and settled qualities of the parents, or of the more remote ancestors, reappear in the child; while prenatal influence signifies the effect produced upon the future being by temporary conditions of the parents in the above periods, or by temporary mental states (anger, fear, happiness) or by temporary physical conditions (activity, health, exhaustion of a part or of the entire body).

It is a matter of every-day note that children of the same parents, born within a few years of each other, are often totally unlike in disposition and in physical attributes. They may be not only unlike each other, but unlike the parents themselves. The law of heredity would require the constitution of the child to be made up of the personal characteristics of each parent, but we find virtuous and well-meaning parents, with long lines of reputable ancestry, bringing forth vicious and obstinate children, and, on the other hand, the ignorant and vulgar sometimes producing children