It remains to notice one or two questions or objections that must be disposed of before our subject is complete.

(1) The materialist comes and says, "I grant that all these things that you have said are facts; but how do you know that every thing is not the result of the various combinations of matter? Who shall say that the poems of Shakspere, the science of Newton, and the religion of Jesus, are not the outflowering of the higher and finer forms of matter, just as much as the rose is a blossoming of the dust?" Such questions as these are asked by some of the best thinkers of the time. We cannot afford to slight them.

I have two suggestions by way of reply. And, first, if you say these things that we call intellectual and spiritual inhere in and come out of matter, then you change the whole conception of the term, and matter becomes something spiritual and divine. This is utter destruction of the old materialism, and makes matter only a form of the eternal. It simply converts matter into what we mean when we say spirit. But, in the second place, I challenge any man living to prove that matter is a real and substantial existence in itself, and as separated from the force and life that we call spirit. So far as any man can tell, matter is only the robe that spirit and life eternally weave for themselves, and no more capable of separation from them than light can be separated from sunshine. What matter is, or what spirit is, in itself, nobody knows so that to say there is nothing but matter, is just as offensive and unwarranted dogmatism as is any ecclesiastical claim

whatever.

Even a man like Huxley will say that the idealism of Berkeley is more consonant with our present knowledge than is dogmatic materialism.

(2) Another question: Is the God of evolution a personal God?

Here, again, I must make a twofold answer. If your term person" implies what we mean when we say Gen. Grant is a person, or Queen Victoria is a person, then any thoughtful mind will have to say No: God is not a person in that sense. This kind of personality is limited, outlined, localized. Any true thought of God recognizes him as infinite; and the infinite cannot be bounded, outlined, or localized. You must not paint God as Moses and Michael Angelo did, as only a great man, exalted, and sitting on a throne, even if you give him the brow of Jove, and put the lightning in his grasp. Jesus asserted the higher idea when he said, "God is a spirit." He is not on Zion or Gerizim alone, but everywhere. But, on the other hand, if by denying him personality you take away from him something, and lower him in your thought, you must not do it. He is not less than personal, but infinitely more. Personality, in man, is one of his minor manifestations; and that which is manifested is not something more, but something less, than that which manifests. Nothing comes out of nothing; neither does the greater come out of the less. God, then, is all of good and great and helpful that we mean by personal; and beyond that he is infinitely more than the word "personal" can ex

press.

Who, then, is the God of evolution?

Not the mechani

cal contriver, or the Oriental despot of the Old Testament; not the Zoroastrian Ahura-Mazda, ruling but half the world; not the Hindoo Brahm asleep in the heavens; not a deity dwelling in temples, and only to be sought at special altars; not the partial and implacable God of Calvin; not one sitting afar on his throne, to be reached only through mediators. The righteousness which is by evolution speaketh on this wise: Say not in thy heart, Who shall ascend into heaven to bring him down? nor, Who will descend into the deep to bring him up? But what saith it? God is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart. And it says this with a reality and meaning never said before. Or it borrows the beautiful and mystic tongue of Wordsworth, and speaks of

"A sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things."

Or, with Alexander Pope, it is ready to run its faith into music, and sing, —

"All are but parts of one stupendous whole,

Whose body nature is, and God the soul;

Tha, changed through all, is yet in all the same;

Great in the earth as in the ethereal frame:

Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent,

Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,

As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;

As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns
As the rapt seraph that adores and burns;
To him no high, no low, no great, no small:
He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all”

IV.

THE MAN OF EVOLUTION.

ONE of the most noted sayings of the early philosophy in Greece was contained in the two words, "Know thyself." And, however much we may be interested in stars or earth or animals, yet history, biography, epic poetry, and the universal love for novels, tragedy, comedy, and stories, show that to man the most interesting thing in the world is humanity. Even trivial gossip is only interest in our fellow-creatures that has turned a little sour. Thus the nature of man, his origin, and how he came into his present condition, and the drift of his true progress these are the most practical of all questions. And all the great concerns of the day, -religious theory and experience, matters of reform, how to deal with crime, methods of politics and government, all must find their ultimate

The farmer, the physician,

solution in the nature of man. the chemist, the carpenter, the worker in metals, all practical laborers, know that their success depends upon their knowledge of the materials in which they work. The stonecutter cannot hammer his blocks into shape any