with their time, daring to stand alone with God, to sacrifice fame, to sacrifice reputation, to sacrifice money, to sacrifice ease, to sacrifice every thing that stood between them and God. They have been the men who dared to trample pleasure and wealth and fame underneath their feet; marching ahead, the pioneers of humanity, and awaiting praise when, by and by, grateful after-times are willing to write their epitaphs, and honor them on their tombstones. So that still it is true, applying the words to any individual who works for the atonement of humanity, applying them to humanity collective, applying them to Jesus, applying them to any and every one who has in any measure been a savior of his kind, still those words are true, "Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed."

XI.

CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTION.

IF evolution is true, what becomes of Christianity? Are the two antagonistic, so that one necessarily excludes the other? That depends upon definitions. Prof. Tayler Lewis said, not long ago, that the dogma of the supernatural and instantaneous creation of man, by the fiat of a purely personal God, was the very foundation of Christianity, and essential to its existence. But I utterly fail to see how the two have any necessary relation to each other. So I would answer our opening question by saying, Since evolution is true, therefore Christianity, one of its products, is also true. This statement will hold only of its essential life. Forms and statements may change indefinitely, while the same life that created the forms remains. The life that animates the caterpillar, as it crawls slowly along the ground, is the same life that soars and floats and glitters in the butterfly. The transformation extinguishes not the life. One of the results of evolution cannot possibly contradict evolution itself. I am none the less a Christian, then, because I am an evolutionist.

I

will even say I am a Christian because I am an evolutionist. To justify this position, to trace the progress of religion until it culminates in Christianity, and to show the relation it sustains to those religions that have preceded it, this is my present purpose.

The first form that the religious thought of the world clothed itself in was fetichism. It sprung up naturally and necessarily out of the best and highest thought of the time. It is nothing to be contemptuously despised, any more than the infant's first efforts at speech. It accorded with all the philosophy and facts then known, quite as well as Christianity to-day harmonizes with the knowledge of to-day. It agreed perfectly with what was known of the universe, and sprang out of that knowledge. It was just as necessary a phase of the religious life of humanity, as twilight is a necessary phase of sunrising. Look at the process of thought out of which it sprung. Man recognized his own personal will and choice as the source of all his movements and power. This was the only kind of power he knew any thing about: therefore, whenever he saw exhibitions of life and power, he could account for them only on the ground of his knowledge and experience. Man can never conceive of any thing that transcends all his knowledge. Thus his experience compelled him to endow with personal will and choice every thing about him. His dreams made him familiar with the thought of spiritual beings existing apart from substantial bodies; and these souls he thought of as the source of life and power. And it was natural for his crude thought,

to endow all things with souls. Thus, when a savage buried along with the dead warrior his horse, his bow and arrow and spear, his kettle and his cooking utensils and tent appurtenances, he was not so silly as to suppose that he was going to take these material things with him to the happy hunting-grounds: he believed that the souls of these things would accompany and still serve and be useful to the soul of the warrior. Stones, sticks, trees, reptiles, birds, springs, rivers, all things were thus alive to him, and represented a personal consciousness like his

own.

And, as I have already shown, since the principal forces encompassing early humanity were forces that hurt them, on the action of which they could not calculate, and of which they were therefore afraid, they thought that most of these beings were evil-disposed toward them. They did not know nature enough to control it, and make its powers serve them, and they had not philosophy enough to see how apparent evils might become real good so, of necessity, their first gods were devils, and the earliest religions were devil-worship. Even to-day, should you go to people in this condition of mind (and fetich-worship is still widely prevalent), and tell them about God, they would perhaps inquire, "But what if this great being should eat me?" and the effect would very likely be, that they would run off affrighted into the jungle, to get away from God.

You will notice here what you will find to be true always and everywhere, that the prevailing thought of

God accords with, and is on the same level as, the prevalent philosophy of the universe, the theory of the world.

The next step in the evolution of religion was to polytheism. This is only fetichism partially generalized. That is, instead of making each tree a god, they rose to the thought of one god for all the trees. Instead of each frog or serpent being a deity, they had thought of a king, or god, of all the frogs or all the serpents. They divided nature off into departments, with a deity supreme in and ruling each. Thus Eolus became god of the winds, Neptune of the oceans and seas, Jupiter of the heavens, Pluto of the under world of spirits, and so on. The individual spirit in each individual thing was not at first destroyed: only there was one chief, like the chief of a tribe, who held the allegiance of all. You see here the social and political condition reflected in the religion. This only shows how all the different departments of human thought and life, social, political, philosophical, and religious, keep even step and progress side by side. One side of humanity does not outrun another. Not only did they have gods of the several departments of nature; but they gradually rose to the conception of abstract ideas, and had deities to represent the departments of thought and the various mental life. So Apollo was the god of eloquence, Minerva the goddess of wisdom, the Muses superintended poetry and the arts.

One step more brought the human mind to anthropomorphic monotheism. That is, they generalized still more; and instead of gods supreme in their different