vians, all independently discovered the making of bronze. The Chinese, the Mayas, and the Germans invented the printing-press. Confucius, Zoroaster, and Jesus independently promulgated the golden rule. Applied to primitive. man, this law of spontaneity accounts for the fact that several languages, with no root affinity, arose in different parts of the world. At a certain stage of human evolution, corresponding to childhood, language is a spontaneity. It was probably the same with tool-making. All religions have followed similar lines of evolution, and reformations, and decay.

There is in human evolution also a great deal of what may be termed periodicity. Ideas and lines of thought run their courses in given periods. Religions have from the outset had a period of about five hundred years. Brahminism, itself a reformation of an antecedent faith, burst out simultaneously over Asia about 2000 B. C. The law-giving by Manu in Southern Asia, by Tschow in Eastern Asia, and by Moses in Western Asia, was spontaneous and simultaneous about 1400 and 1500 B. C. The song and psalm era of David and Homer was about 1000 B. C. Buddha in India, Confucius in China, Socrates in Greece, flashed forth about 500 B. C. Five hundred years later, Jesus, concentering all lines of evolution, symbolized the cosmopolitan unity of all future development. 500 to 600 A. D. the papacy was established, and Mohammed began his crusade of monotheism. 1000 A. D. the completed hierarchy was established by Hildebrand; 1500 A. D. the Reformation by Luther was kindled. As we near 2000, it seems certain that we are approaching the culmination and establishment of the age of Reason as the basis of Faith. Nature steadily moves on intelligent lines. It is not a bundle of haps, or of disconnected forces, but all nature, at all times, in all places, operates for definite ends; exactly as all the complex functions of the human body are after all a unity, and act with spontaneous and simultaneous concord. Ideas

are but points in the evolution of one life; and, though we see these ideas through the mediumship of different minds, they are, after all, one idea.

Another law involved in human progress is that of irritability. Antagonism has been the lever of advance. Idea wars began as soon as ideas took shape. They displaced the mere brute struggle for existence. The latest achievement of reason is toleration. We have now all-sufficient antagonism and stimulus in the problems of science. Every new idea was ever welcomed into the world as an ungodly innovation. The old was sacred; the new was profane-that is, opposed to the altar's ritual. Reason, which is essentially comparison, and therefore critical, begets at once conflict. So it is reforms have been struggles, and cost the world its sweetest lives; nor have they ever ended at the point for which they were inaugurated. Monkeys can get on with their philosophies and religion without conflict; but men can not, until they have reasoned reason's broadest demonstration-equal rights. Men began to live in the herd; the breaking up into individuals was a slow evolution. All religions, all philosophies, all parties, have sought to establish an eternal camp at some mile-stone of progress; but all have failed. It is difficult to grasp the full force of this idea the individual. Is there any difference in mice or minks; among butterflies or among beetles? In a hive of bees all look alike and act alike; but higher up there is more specific individual character. Dogs are not alike in reasoning power or in instinct. Cats are peculiarly unlike in our companionship, but shockingly alike when left to their own ways. Men of lower races are much of one pattern. Civilization is an individualizing process; so in turn men of intense character have done most of the propelling that has constituted civilization.

The final law of human evolution is that it is, from the nature of man, a slow achievement. The fact that in the development of structural life before man a large part fell

into degeneracy, and nearly all the rest dropped functionally into automatism-this fact is carried on into the intellectual evolution that follows man. There is a constant tendency to let the reasoning energy run down into instinct or human automatism. A new lesson, well learned, and the masses fall into the practice of it as a habit, and are satisfied. It is their land's end. Whoever would go farther is a disturber and atheist. Religion thus becomes a mechanical evil, losing its moral character in ritualism.

The general course of progressive thought has been rigidly on this line: 1. A growth of knowledge of natural phenomena, and attempts at referring them to adequate causes. 2. This effort, involving some positive results, ends in an agglomeration of myth and science, as theology. 3. A code of arbitrary morals arises, based on the extent of existing knowledge and mythology. 4. Another advance in the way of increasing knowledge attacks established ritual and belief, ending after bitter strife in a Reformation. 5. The new heresy having established itself as orthodoxy, loses its own plasticity, and is assailed in turn by a later system of knowledge and faith. The gods of the old faith in each case become the devils of the new. Up to this century all progress in thought and knowledge has taken the ultimate shape of theology; all science has sought a compromise with mythology. However, through all the revolutions there has been an evolution; and all religions. have moved on the king's highway to higher hopes and purer purposes.

That progress must be slow, and by easy stages, is a physiological and psychological necessity. The brain can not retain its equilibrium in connection with too sudden and rapid revolution. This is especially true of uncivilized races. The brain of an African is driven to insanity when brought in contact with the outermost whirl of European activity. Yet human history has always involved, like antecedent history, many startling transitions. Large modi

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fications have followed apparently insignificant causes. leap in the evolution of structures, I showed you, was within the provision of natural law. It is the same with intellectual and ethical progress. The alphabet, the press, the steamship, mark propulsions of such an extraordinary nature; but never has human thought speeded with such continuous leaps of inspired progress as during our own age of science. Freed from the necessity of conforming our knowledge to a preconceived theory of causation, mind has achieved in one century the work of a millennium.

Strike the golden spike! master workman, on the way
Humanity is traveling with the traveling of the day.
Strike the spike of gold! as struck primeval man,

When a highway Godward, to travel he began ;

When with celt of unhewn stone he scored the birth of mind,
And the first mile-stone was set that left the brute behind.

Strike! strike! master workman, on the road to kinglier men ;
Scarce the spike is driven ere thou must strike again.
For the road thou buildest is a road without an end,
Leading where with human effort hope and reason blend;
Looking from each station adown the road of time,
Changing folly into wisdom and discord into rhyme.

At his station on the shore, the gray Phenician reads
The alphabet, his wit devised for hurrying human needs;
Still farther down the ages John Guttenberg strikes strong,
With lever of the press, a spike through ancient wrong;
And once again James Watt to speeding truth adds speed,
And across old bigotry writes a broader human creed.

Strike the spike of gold to bind the bands of steel,
And thus the age of iron to the age of gold anneal;
Through the heart of elder evil, the love of brutish strife,
Drive the spike of human progress and a loftier, truer life.
Gird the world! The nations blend! Peace and love proclaim,
To evolve a nobler man is the world's predestined aim.

LECTURE III.

JESUS THE CHRIST OF EVOLUTION.

EVOLUTION has in world-making concentered its forces in suns as well as minor worlds, and from them distributed its power over vast areas of space and time. In the development of life types were established by a similar concentering of forces. The saurian represented a massing of power, which was later distributed, and differenced in sea and air. The phenocodus was a reservoir, from which went out the higher forms of mammals. This is true in a larger sense of the accumulations of intellectual and moral power since the development of man. Great men stand at historic points, at their birth receiving and concentering a large range of influences; and by their lives distributing the same widely as human benefactors. This was true as we have seen of Abram, of Buddha, of Jesus, of Mohammed, as well as Luther and Darwin. When an age ripens it ripens in a man or group of men, and in that man or men is the seed of the coming age.

Among all historic characters, however, there is one in whom evolution concentered more of human history than in any other, and from whom it has rayed out more widely and beneficently. A study of Jesus is absolutely essential to a comprehension of evolution in human character, and the progress of the race. Evolution alone is adequate to explain his position and his influence.

A false conception of Jesus is a necessity to one who