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shall make the discovery, he shall find that the discovery is in perfect harmony with the conclusions of the old faith. No modern theist would deny that there must be somewhere a line of boundary between the animal and the man. Nay, if we mistake not, the very account of man's creation in Genesis ii. 7 would readily lend itself to the doctrine of a missing link in the order of intelligence. The formation of man from the dust of the ground, and the breathing into man's nostrils of that breath of life which constitutes his humanity, would seem to have been not one act but two. For all the writer of Genesis says to the contrary, there may have intervened between these acts a long period of ages, an interval as wide as that which we imagine to have divided the transitional developments of the preceding creative days. There may have been an intelligence in which the physical dominated over the spiritual, before the advent of that intelligence in which the spiritual was designed to dominate over the physical.

It is on this ground that we must regard the question of man's antiquity as one of no theological import. That which makes man, as we know him, is not his form but his spirit. If you could prove the existence ten thousand years ago of a human hand and of an implement wielded by that hand, the proof would not in the smallest

degree be at variance with any doctrine of the ancient faith. This human hand might belong to that lower humanity which God formed from the dust of the ground, and which seems to have preceded the advent of what is called the living soul. We shall therefore leave here out of account all discussion as to man's antiquity: whatever difficulties might be raised by such a discussion, they would not be difficulties of a distinctively modern type. The doctrine of man's antiquity, if it be an error, is not an error distinctive of the doctrine of evolution, nor in any sense peculiar to the spirit of modern science. It had itself its home in antiquity, in the heart of the ancient world, in the creeds of Brahmanism and of Confucianism, where the spirit of modern science was unknown. We shall therefore pass by this question on the other side. We are confining ourselves purely to those points in which the old religious faith comes into contact, and is thought to come into collision, with the new doctrine of evolution. So far as we have yet gone, we have found, indeed, abundant points of contact, but not a single point of collision. We have found that on the question of creation, on the question of special creation, on the question of the difference of species, and on the question of the Divine origin of life, the new faith has willingly lent itself to the old. We have now reached the highest manifestation of life of which

our experience is cognisant-the being of Man. We have found that science and religion alike have been willing to recognise at once the community of his nature with other natures, and the superiority of his personality to other lives: we now go on to see whether the old faith's traditional account of his primitive condition is one that can be harmonised with the spirit of the nineteenth century.

CHAPTER VIII.

EVOLUTION AND THE PRIMITIVE MAN.

THERE are two opposite tendencies which in every age have divided the minds of men-the tendency to glorify and the tendency to depreciate the past. The former is the spirit of the popular mind; the latter is the impulse of the man of science. The popular mind has in all ages reverted with longing gaze to the vision of a glorified past. It has ever been prone to hold "that the former days were better than these," that the world as it has advanced in years has become more laden with cares, and that the increase of its knowledge has been the increase of its sorrow. It has therefore seen the climax of human joy not at the end but at the beginning of human history, and has regarded every step in the progress from that beginning as an additional distance interposed between itself and the golden age. The scientific spirit, on the other hand, has uniformly taken another and an opposite view. If the popular

mind has seen the good old times in the past, the spirit of science has beheld the fruition of all things in the future. To the spirit of science the past is not glorious, simply because it is not scientific. It looks upon all happiness as dependent on economical conditions. The welfare of man, in its view, is inseparable from the latest results of civilisation-from the abbreviations of time and space, from the interchange of national sympathies, from the spread of commerce, from the diffusion of the useful and the ornamental arts of life. It will therefore consent to see no paradise in the past. It entertains for the most part an optimistic view of the possibilities of man and of the prospects of human development, and therefore it places its highest hope in the advent of that future age which shall witness the accumulated result of the ripening of intellectual power.

In no sphere have these tendencies been more markedly displayed than in the respective criticisms which science and religion have given of the doctrine of a Fall. In the view of the old faith, man was originally sinless. The period of his existence most free from sorrow was just the first age of his being. His transition from the first to the second age was not a step upward but a step downward, not an elevation but a decline. To the new faith, on the other hand, such a belief is an entire delusion. On this

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