cut off, will or will not form a part of the resurrection body.

Evolution simply takes man as it finds him, traces his origin, studies his nature, and, looking along the line of his development, attempts to forecast his probable future. If it cannot say as broadly as Paul does, “Now are we [all men] the sons of God," it can say, "Now are all who live after the law of their higher nature the sons of God." Man, then, once animal, has climbed up into the possibility of sonship to the Highest; and in many cases he has made the possibility a fact. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be;" but along the line of knowledge, obedience, and struggle, there stretches before humanity an ascending pathway up to God, bright and grand as the sloping beams of light that bridge the deeps of space from the horizon's edge up to the unbearable glory of the rising sun. Here lies the way of religious progress, philanthropic labor, and all reform. It is to be trodden by all those who subdue the animal, and climb up into the mind and the soul. And the true help for our fellows is to be offered in assisting them up, step by step, along this same stairway of attainment. No man can be suddenly "converted" into it, any more than ignorance can be suddenly converted into knowledge. One may be suddenly waked up to the fact of his ignorance, and may suddenly determine to go to school; but the way of learning is long, and so is the way of all progress.

In the light of human nature, as thus revealed, may be seen the futility of some of the present prominent notions

about reform, as in matters of temperance, social vice, and the repression of crime. You cannot legislate character. The most that laws can do is to help on suitable conditions for the development of character.

I have purposely passed by the question of a future life for man. It only remains for me to glance at the possibilities of his earthly outlook, as hinted by evolution. Man was first an animal, without shelter or fire or clothing or weapons or domestic utensils of any kind. We can trace him to the time when he fought the bear for possession of his cave. His first weapon was a club; then he discovered fire, and so was able to mould metals, and manufacture utensils and weapons. All the forces of nature were hostile to him, because he was ignorant of their laws, and so was constantly transgressing and suffering. But gradually he learned to obey them, and so became their master. When he obeyed the laws of the wind, he made it sail his boats; when he knew the laws of water, he made it turn his mills; when he learned the use of fire, he cleared the forests and discovered manufactures to-day he has made conquest, by his knowledge, of immense tracts of the globe. Lightning, light, heat, magnetism, chemical forces, are all become his servants. is just winning his crown and grasping his sceptre. But though we call ourselves civilized, we can see enough of the yet unattained possibilities of man and the earth to make us feel that we are as yet only in the morning twilight the full day is before us; conquests await us in earth and air and sea. Government shall be perfected;

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crime shall be outgrown ; most of the diseases from which we now suffer shall be abolished. Accumulated wealth, and knowledge of the yet undiscovered resources of the earth, shall solve the problems of hunger and cold and want, and deliver man from the crushing burdens of the mere struggle for subsistence. Then man will be free to go up and live in the affections, the mind, and the spirit. It is perfectly within the scope of the forces and laws now at work about us, to develop on earth a paradise as much fairer than Eden as the noble plans and works of manhood are higher and better than the dreams of the nursery. Plato's republic and More's Utopia are only hints of what the future will realize. The whole earth can be made a garden, and human life upon it so regulated in accord with natural laws that all government and society. and individual life shall run as noiselessly and harmoniously as the stars move in the sky. Evil and pain and disease will be outgrown.

How long will it take? Thousands of years. But God is in no hurry, having eternity to work in. He has been millenniums already, in developing us to what we are; and yet we are only on the threshold of what is not only 'possible but probable. The future stretches out a road so long, that those who stand on the heights of the ages to come may look back and think of human history from the first until now, as we think of the first mile of a journey across the continent; as we regard the time from Adam to the flood, in the old story.

"Beloved, now are we the sons of God;" and indeed

"it doth not yet appear what we shall be." But the scroll of earth-life that God is unrolling has in it wonders and surprises of good and beauty and glory that we cannot now even imagine; but we may safely say that the blossom will be worthy of the root and the trunk.

V.

THE DEVIL; OR, THE NATURE OF EVIL.

To the devil has been popularly attributed the authorship of all human ills. I propose, therefore, to trace in rapid outline the more important phases of the development of the satanic idea, that we may understand how the belief has risen and grown. Then I shall pass to what we really know of the origin and nature of evil. A knowledge of what it is will suggest practical measures for controlling or escaping it.

Let us begin by trying to understand the condition and state of mind of the first men on the earth. You must imagine yourselves divested of every thing that we include under the term "civilization." Not only must you mentally blot out the cities, the telegraphs, the railways, the roads, the ships, but you must also think of them as without houses, without even the simplest domestic implements and utensils, without any knowledge of iron or copper or other metals of which they could make weapons for their defence. They had no clothing, except as they could strip a tree of its bark, or rob an animal of its skin.