that history, has nothing in it improbable.  There can be no question that we inherit these things very largely, and that they are also very largely due to special peculiarities of constitution in each individual.  That large part of us which is rightly assigned to our nature as distinct from our own will and our own free action, it is perfectly reasonable to find subject to laws of Evolution.  Much of this nature, indeed, we share with the lower animals.  They, too, can love; can be angry or pleased; can put affection above appetite; can show generosity and nobility of spirit; can be patient, persevering, tender, self-sacrificing; can take delight in society:  and some can even organise it, and thus enter on a kind of civilisation.  The dog and the horse, man’s faithful servants and companions, show emotions and affections rising as far as mere emotions and affections can rise to the human level.  Ants show an advance in the arts of life well comparable to our own.  If the bare animal nature is thus capable of such high attainments by the mere working of natural forces, it is to be expected that similar forces in mankind should be found to work under similar laws.  We are not spiritual beings only, we are animals, and whatever nature has done for other animals we may expect it to have done and to be doing for us.  And if their nature is capable of evolution, so too should ours be.  And the study of such evolution of our own nature is likely to be of the greatest value.  This nature is the main instrument, put into the grasp as it were of that spiritual faculty which is our inmost essence, to be used in making our whole life an offering to God.  It is good to know what can be done with this instrument and what cannot; how it has been formed in the past, and may be still further formed for the future.  It is good to study the evolution of humanity.  But all this does not touch the spiritual faculty itself, nor the Moral Law which that faculty proclaims to us.  The essence of that law is its universality; and out of all this development, when carried to its very perfection, the conception of such universality cannot be obtained.  Nothing in this evolution ever rises to the height of a law which shall bind even God Himself and enable Abraham to say, ‘Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?’ The very word right in this, its fulness of meaning, cannot be used.

Evolution may lead the creature to say what is hateful and what is loveable, what is painful and what is delightful, what is to be feared and what is to be sought; it may develope the sentiment which comes nearest of all to the sentiment of reverence, namely, the sentiment of shame; but it cannot reveal the eternal character of the distinction between right and wrong.  Nay, there may be, as was pointed out in the last Lecture, an evolution in our knowledge even of the Moral Law, just as there is an evolution in our knowledge of mathematics.  The fulness of its meaning can become clearer and ever clearer as generation learns