If any one should object to or deride the doctrine of the evolution or successive development of the animated forms which constitute that unbroken organic chain reaching from the beginning of life on the globe to the present times, let him reflect that he has himself passed through modifications the counterpart of those he disputes.  For nine months his type of life was aquatic, and during that time he assumed, in succession, many distinct but correlated forms.  At birth his type of life became aerial; he began respiring the atmospheric air; new elements of food were supplied to him; the mode of his nutrition changed; but as yet he could see nothing, hear nothing, notice nothing.  By degrees conscious existence was assumed; he became aware that there is an external world.  In due time organs adapted to another change of food, the teeth, appeared, and a change of food ensued.  He then passed through the stages of childhood and youth, his bodily form developing, and with it his intellectual powers.  At about fifteen years, in consequence of the evolution which special parts of his system had attained, his moral character changed.  New ideas, new passions, influenced him.  And that that was the cause, and this the effect, is demonstrated when, by the skill of the surgeon, those parts have been interfered with.  Nor does the development, the metamorphosis, end here; it requires many years for the body to reach its full perfection, many years for the mind.  A culmination is at length reached, and then there is a decline.  I need not picture its mournful incidents—­ the corporeal, the intellectual enfeeblement.  Perhaps there is little exaggeration in saying that in less than a century every human being on the face of the globe, if not cut off in an untimely manner, has passed through all these changes.

Is there for each of us a providential intervention as we thus pass from stage to stage of life? or shall we not rather believe that the countless myriads of human beings who have peopled the earth have been under the guidance of an unchanging, a universal law?

But individuals are the elementary constituents of communities—­nations.  They maintain therein a relation like that which the particles of the body maintain to the body itself.  These, introduced into it, commence and complete their function; they die, and are dismissed.

Like the individual, the nation comes into existence without its own knowledge, and dies without its own consent, often against its own will.  National life differs in no particular from individual, except in this, that it is spread over a longer span, but no nation can escape its inevitable term.  Each, if its history be well considered, shows its time of infancy, its time of youth, its time of maturity, its time of decline, if its phases of life be completed.

In the phases of existence of all, so far as those phases are completed, there are common characteristics, and, as like accordances in individuals point out that all are living under a reign of law, we are justified in inferring that the course of nations, and indeed the progress of humanity, does not take place in a chance or random way, that supernatural interventions never break the chain of historic acts, that every historic event has its warrant in some preceding event, and gives warrant to others that are to follow..