of his environment, and that means capable of knowing something about God, knows at least what God requires of him, namely, righteousness, love, and likeness to himself; or, as the old heathen seer expressed it, “to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly before God.”  Man is and must be a religious being.  And he conforms consciously.  Thus to be more like God he must know more about him, and to know more about him he must become more like him.  The two go hand in hand, and by mutual reaction strengthen each other.  I will not enter into the most important question of all, whether we can ever really know a person unless we have some love for him.  The facts of evolution seem to me to admit of but one interpretation, that of Augustine:  “Thou hast formed me for thee, O Lord, and my restless spirit finds no rest but in thee.”  Granted, therefore, a personal God in and behind environment, however dimly perceived, and conformity to environment means god-likeness; for conformity to a person can mean nothing less than likeness to him.

Some of you must, all of you should, have read Professor Huxley’s “Address on Education.”  In it he says, “It is a very plain and elementary truth that the life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess.  It is a game which has been played for unknown ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own.  The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature.  The player on the other side is hidden from us.  We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient.  But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.  To the man who plays well the highest stakes are paid with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength.  And one who plays ill is checkmated—­without haste, but without remorse.

“My metaphor,” he continues, “will remind some of you of the famous picture in which Retzsch has depicted Satan playing at chess with man for his soul.  Substitute for the mocking fiend in that picture a calm, strong angel, who is playing for love, as we say, and would rather lose than win—­and I should accept it as an image of human life."[1]

  [Footnote 1:  Huxley:  Lay Sermons and Addresses, p. 31.]

This is a marvellous illustration, and in general as true as it is beautiful and grand.  But that “calm, strong angel who is playing for love, as we say, and would rather lose than win,” is certainly a very strange antagonist.  Is it, after all, possible that our clear-eyed scientific man has altogether misunderstood the game?  Is not the “calm, strong angel” more probably our partner?  Certainly very many things point that