lapse of conscious energy into unconscious energy, Nature struggles ceaselessly. She crosses stocks, and supplies the momentum of new environments. Our danger is not from new adaptations, but from falling into instinctive religion, instinctive loving, instinctive living, instinctive methods of thinking and acting.

Can the permutation, produced by crossing races, continue forever to rescue national energy from dropping down into formalism? As internationalism brings about a more rapid and easy fusion of races, it also hastens us toward the limit of new crosses. Is cosmopolitanism therefore the end? It will be only a larger nationalism, as a larger nationalism is an enlarged individualism. The end is completion; and completion precedes extinction. now with great rapidity becoming extinct. The insect families only hold their own. The vegetable kingdom swings once more slowly toward preponderant power. We move inevitably with the animal kingdom. Will the geology of some vast future gather our remains as we gather the bones of the megatherium?

Animals are

So you see it becomes an all-absorbing race question, not a mere question of individual immortality, whether man has not at some point of his evolutionary career reached a point of union with the Universal Divine Life; whether his ethical and rational development, depending on what we crudely call inspiration, does not involve also his vital and physical evolution. Man's real grandeur and his strength seem to be that he has, by the force of evolution, become psychically identified with an essential and infinite life-toward which he looks as Father. The question is not wholly what Nature would do with us, since man already vetoes much that she undertakes to do.

Evolution has to do with a fact larger than man, even with life itself. Having in the course of evolution reached man, we must not forget that he is of interest mainly as a phenomenon of that Infinite One that we were compelled

Morals from

to consider before man was. The evolution of man is properly conceived only as the finest manifestation of that life, in which he lives, moves, and has his being. this point consist in sustaining and enlarging vitality; immorality is self-destruction. Salvation is not a mechanical scheme of pardon, but a practical obedience to life-laws, that render our existence more complete, more sure, and more enduring, as well as more beautiful. Life eternal is to know the eternal life; to be conscious of, and intelligently faithful to, the life that would in us work out the problem of love and truth; and write over all the records in our brains the golden rule.

LECTURE VI.

ETHICS THE AIM OF EVOLUTION.

AFTER all, the most prominent feature of human life is its quality of right and wrong. Man is an ethical being, with choice open between two ways. His evolution and his degeneration lie before him as matters within his own purposing power. Is ethical purpose purely a human attribute, or does it run through all nature? Is it an attainment that marks the summit of evolution, or is there an ethical purpose running through all the development of life from its origin ?

All views of morals apart from evolution, whether of the utilitarian sort, or the transcendent reason of Kant, look from a theoretic standpoint. Man has in conscience a divine guide; yet practically the human family consists of different races, with wholly different conceptions of right and wrong; and with ideals, called gods, as absolutely opposed in character as love and hate, forgiveness and revenge-the Prince of Peace, and the God of War. The Apache, says General Crook, does not understand you. His conception of morals demands the acts that you condemn. His social and religious position, for time and eternity, depend on revenge and bloody retaliation. He has never evolved beyond the eye-for-eye stage of moral perception. There is no readier confutation of the supposition of a divinely-revealed code, or an inherited apprehension of morals, than the evolution of the God of the

Hebrew scriptures from the Jehovah of the Old Testament to the Divine Love of the New; or the evolution of the conception of right from the covenant with Abraham and the robbery of the Canaanites to the golden rule.

The field is, however, in the main, held by those who believe that moral law, if not our moral judgment, originates in the will of a Creator. Right depends on obedience to laws established by this Supreme Person, and by him either printed in man's conscience, or revealed in what are known as his scriptures. Cardinal Newman, one of the most careful expounders of orthodoxy, gives us the following authoritative view: "Behind the veil of the visible universe, there is an invisible, intelligent being, acting on and through it, as and where he will. This invisible agent is in no sense a soul of the world, after the analogy of human nature, but, on the contrary, is absolutely distinct from the world as being its creator, upholder, governor, and sovereign lord. I mean one who is sovereign over his own will and actions; though always according to the eternal rule of right and wrong, which is himself. On rational beings he has imprinted the moral law, and given them power to obey it, imposing on them the duty of worship and service; searching and scanning them through and through with his omniscient eye, and putting before them a present trial and a judgment to come. The laws of the universe, the principles of truth, the qualities and virtues, all that exists is from him. Not indeed the incidental sin, overabundant as it is, but the great outlines and issues of human affairs are from his dispositions." I should be glad to give you the whole of this superb and daring affirmation, of not only a creator of things, but a creator of morals. This view of morals not only makes right and wrong wholly depend on the fiat of a supernatural being, but it wholly fails to show why he is not himself, by that fiat, accountable for evil. It makes, also, at one stroke, prayer to be a puerile absurdity, and reduces

religion to an effort to induce an absolute being to modify his eternal and unchangeable determinations. Deriving our only conceptions of right from him, we find our most pious exertion in endeavoring to persuade the author of goodness to conform to our conceptions of right.

Or if, on the contrary, this supreme, extra-natural being be not innately right himself, according to our highest standard of right, if he contravenes our simplest conceptions of justice, then to pray to him becomes an appeal to what, to us, is wrong by the very standard he has given us. We must morally adhere, not to the absolute standard by which he governs his own actions, but to the standard he has revealed to us to guide ours. How can a man to whom murder is a crime per se address a being who can slay at will? How can a man of the nineteenth century supplicate and worship the being who directed the war of Israel against Amalek ?

As an historical fact has God, or has any god, ever had a moral attribute not derived from his worshipers? The very word implies as much. Instead of his revealing a code to us, have we not created code for him? and do we not expect him to abide by and enforce it? Our prayers consist largely of reminders to Deity from our standard of morals, on the supposition that right with us must be right with him.

Theoretically, God can do as he chooses; his will is moral law.

"Let bears and lions growl and fight,

For God hath made them so.

"I thank the goodness and the grace
Which on My birth hath smiled;
And made me in this Christian land,
A free and happy child."

Here the child is taught complicity with a purpose that leaves the bulk of children in moral darkness, because itself,