Should we not find equal difficulty in believing the life-history of each one of us,—­the start in the germ, then the vague suggestion of fish, and frog, and reptile, in our foetal life,—­were it not a matter of daily experience?  Let it be granted that the race of man was born as literally out of the animal forms below him as the child is born out of these vague, prenatal animal forms in its mother’s womb.  Yet the former fact so far transcends our experience, and even our power of imagination, that we can receive it only by an act of scientific faith, as our fathers received the dogmas of the Church by an act of religious faith.

I confess that I find it hard work to get on intimate terms with evolution, familiarize my mind with it, and make it thinkable.  The gulf that separates man from the orders below him is so impassable, his intelligence is so radically different from theirs, and his progress so enormous, while they have stood still, that believing it is like believing a miracle.  That the apparently blind groping and experimentation which mark the course of evolution as revealed by palaeontology—­the waste, the delay, the vicissitudes, the hit-and-miss method—­should have finally resulted in this supreme animal, man, puts our scientific faith to the test.  In the light of evolution how the halo with which we have surrounded our origin vanishes!

Man has from the earliest period believed himself of divine origin, and by the divine he has meant something far removed from this earth and all its laws and processes, something quite transcending the mundane forces.  He has invented or dreamed myths and legends to throw the halo of the exceptional, the far removed, the mystical, or the divine around his origin.  He has spurned the clod with his foot; he has denied all kinship with bird and beast around him, and looked to the heavens above for the sources of his life.  And then unpitying science comes along and tells him that he is under the same law as the life he treads under foot, and that that law is adequate to transform the worm into the man; that he, too, has groveled in the dust, or wallowed in the slime, or fought and reveled, a reptile among reptiles; that the heavens above him, to which he turns with such awe and reverence, or such dread and foreboding, are the source of his life and hope in no other sense than they are the source of the life and hope of all other creatures.  But this is the way of science; it enhances the value or significance of everything about us that we are wont to treat as cheap or vulgar, and it discounts the value of the things far off upon which we have laid such stress.  It ties us to the earth, it calls in the messengers we send forth into the unknown; it makes the astonishing revelation—­ revolutionary revelation, I may say—­that the earth is embosomed in the infinite heavens the same as the stars that shine above us, that the creative energy is working now and here underfoot, the same as in