All of nature’s processes are slow and always evolutionary.  The controlling laws are subtle and secret and can never be comprehended or understood save as they work out in visible results.  There is every indication that it has required an illimitable series of ages to evolve even the physical form of man in the unnumbered races of the human family from the first semi-human life to man as we see him now—­clever and strong of brain and will, daring and equal to great emergencies, and in inventive, creative and executive gifts a very god of power and might.  The laws of evolution refer primarily to the individual planet, Earth, and include all that it contains—­in a word, all things in any way related to it.  Mineral deposits and crumbling rocks nourish the vegetable world; the vegetable world provides sustenance to the animal kingdom, and it, in turn, with all the others combined, sustains all human life; but its real root, its permanent existence, is in the planet itself.  Each and all of these diverse manifestations of law coordinated, constitute the mysterious modes and methods of the evolution of life from the lower to the higher status of being, and it works on, and ever on eternally, till human life finds its completion and satisfaction in the fulfillment of the law which merges the advanced and prepared soul in the Universal Spirit and crowns its final evolution with its at-one-ment with its Creator.

Nature does not duplicate her handiwork, but cunningly sets her sign on every leaf and branch to insure individuality.  She throws protecting arms around all her growing life of fruit and vegetable in order that each shall reproduce of its own kind, and thus keep intact the orderly succession, and that there shall be no lack of nourishment for the children of men.

She gives without stint to all the peoples of the earth her world-stuff to be worked over into human flesh, and animal fibre.  But no tiniest grain of her possessions has ever, or will ever escape from her hand, and the daily debris from all earth-made bodies is her constant toll.  When the forms are set free from the life principle which has pervaded them in their earthly career, the circle is rounded, and when the grave-rite, dust to native dust we here restore to our great mother is uttered, she is the gainer; for the operation of thus passing the material of which the planet is made through the highest created forms of life, brings it into a certain relationship to spirit, and thus the evolution, the spiritualization of the world-stuff of the planet itself is going forward.

DEATH A BENEFACTOR.

Death is a benefactor to the human race.  How could we bear the burden of existence if Nature did not somewhere on the march “call a halt” while the angels of dissolution tenderly unloose our burdens of pain and sorrow, and disappointment, and stultifying regrets, and remorses for past ill doings and shortcomings?