Our confidence in the results of historical study is therefore proportioned to the extent and thoroughness of the experience which they record, and to the time during which these laws can be proven to have held good.  If I can make it even fairly probable that these laws, on obedience to which human progress and success seem to depend, are merely quoted from a grander code applicable to all life in all times, your confidence in them will be even greater.  I trust I can prove to you that the animal kingdom has not drifted aimlessly at the mercy of every wind and tide and current of circumstance.  I hope to show that along one line it has from the beginning through the ages held a steady course straight onward, and that deviation from this course has always led to failure or degeneration.  From so vast a history we may hope to deduce some of the great laws of true success in life.  Furthermore, if along this central line, at the head of which man stands, there always has been progress, we cannot doubt that future progress will be as certain, and perhaps far more rapid.  In all the struggle of life we shall have the sure hope of success and victory; if not for ourselves still for those who shall come after us.  “We are saved by hope.”  And we may be confident that this hope will never make us ashamed.

Finally, even from our present knowledge of the past progress of life we shall hope to catch hints at least that man’s only path to his destined goal is the straight and narrow road pointed out in the Bible.  If in this we are even fairly successful we shall find a relation and bond between the Bible and Science worthy of all consideration.  And this is the only agreement which can ever satisfy us.

If I wished to bring before you a view of the development of man, I should best choose individuals or families from various periods of human history from the earliest times down to the present.  I should try to tell you how they looked and lived.  But if anyone should attempt to condense into three lectures such a history of even one line of the human race, you would probably think him insane.  Even if he succeeded in giving a fairly clear view of the different stages, the successive stages would be so remote from one another, such vast changes would necessarily remain unnoticed or unexplained that you would hardly believe that they could have any genetic relation or belong to one developmental series.

But the history which I must attempt to condense for you is measured by ages, and the successive terms of the series will be indefinitely more remote from each other than the life and thoughts of Lincoln or Washington from those of our most primitive Aryan ancestor or of the rudest savage of the Stone Age.  The series must appear exceedingly disconnected.  Systems of organs will apparently spring suddenly into existence, and we shall have no time to trace their origin or earlier development.  Even if we had an abundance of time many gaps would still remain; for the forms, which according to our theory must have occupied their place, have long since disappeared and left no trace nor sign.  We have generally no conception at all of the amount of extermination and degeneration which have taken place in past ages.