When we lower the coffin of our beloved is there soothing comfort in the satisfactory reflection that perhaps at some distant epoch, by the harmonious operation of “Natural Selection” and by virtue of the “Conservation of Force,” the “Survival of the fittest” will certainly ensure the “Differentiation” the “Evolution” of our buried treasure into some new, strange, superior type of creature, to us for ever unknown and utterly unrecognizable?  Tormented by aspirations which neither time nor space, force nor matter, will realize or satisfy, consumed by spiritual hunger fiercer than Ugolino’s, we are invited to seize upon the Barmecide’s banquet of “The Law which formulates organic development as a transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous;” and that “this universal transformation is a change from indefinite homogeneity to definite heterogeneity; and that only when the increasing multiformity is joined with increasing definiteness, does it constitute Evolution, as distinguished from other changes that are like it, in respect of increasing heterogeneity.”

Does this wise and simple pabulum cure spiritual starvation?

“God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness.  And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”  Nay—­thunders Science—­put away such childish superstition, smite such traditionary idols; man was first made after the similitude of a marine ascidian, and once swam as a tadpole in primeval seas.

In all the wide universe of modern speculation there remains no unexplored nook or cranny, where an immortal human soul can find refuge or haven.  Having hunted it down, trampled and buried it as one of the little “inspired legendary” foxes that nibble and bruise the promising sprouts of the Science Vineyard, what are we requested to accept in lieu of the doctrine of spiritual immortality?  “Natural Evolution.”

One who has long been regarded as an esoteric in the Eleusis of Science, and who ranks as a crowned head among its hierophants, frankly tells us:  “What are the core and essence of this hypothesis Natural Evolution?  Strip it naked, and you stand face to face with the notion that not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular or animal life, not alone the nobler forma of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but that the human mind itself—­emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena—­were once latent in a fiery cloud.  Many who hold it would probably assent to the position that at the present moment all our philosophy, all our poetry, all our science, all our art—­Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael—­are potential in the fires of the sun."...  A different pedigree from that offered us by Moses and the Prophets, Christ and the Apostles; but does it light up the Hereafter?