yet clearly marked. Whatever the variety in development, a human being is always recognisable as human in origin. And thus it is with all kinds of creatures. For instance, there are no creatures more diversified in form and development than the canine races; and yet every dog is at once significantly recognised by its kindred dog; and thus it is also with every variety of animal, each knows its own kind.

The hereditary tendency, or avitism, is the counterbalance to the tendency to divergence into variety as the result of sexual admixture, the peculiarities of parents blending in their offspring, but never to the production of a new species. If there were not limits set to avitism as well as to variety, we could not, of course, doubt the possibility of endless sameness from the influence of the one tendency, or endless deviation from the influence of the other. But they are antagonistic forces that limit each other. The diagonal between them may by disturbance become a wave-line, but yet ever intermediate, and passing still from one fixed point to another from beginning to end, so that the species on this side never permanently blends with the species on the other. The lines may, by man's interference, be caused to touch, but where they touch they terminate, and, so to say, begin again. Hence hybrids either do not propagate, or, if left to nature, revert to their original types.

From these reasons, and many more that might be easily adduced in a systematic view of natural facts, it will probably be manifest enough to every unbiassed

mind that Darwin's hypothesis concerning the origin of species, whatever it may accomplish towards a better understanding of natural history, is only a beautifully ingenious outrage to reason, so far as it is applied to the explanation of the organic differences existing in the various orders of the animal kingdom. Nor is it less so in relation to any region of life. Were it true, there could be no such thing as definition. And, in as far as it relates to man, it would subvert our moral standing in relation to God and our neighbour. It confounds the brutal nature, which has no moral relations, with man's nature, whose true dignity is all moral and spiritual. It links us with beasts and creeping things, not merely by creation, but by direct derivation of mental faculty, power, and affection. It excludes the especial breath of God from the body and soul of man. And, believing that hypothesis as truth, we might easily be tempted to exonerate ourselves from obligation to observe the dictates of conscience in relation to what is purely human, immortal, and divine, and that in virtue of our animal inheritance of life and death, propensity and passion. Still, thank Heaven, it is man's prerogative, and man's alone, to overrule the lower nature by divine persuasives, the strongest of which is our consciousness of relationship not to brutes, but only to Divinity and to one another, as made to worship God. We must not trace the ills our flesh is heir to' up to an origin in brutes, nor lay our moral perversions to creatures that know nothing of sin, lest we also should lose all sense of its enormity as a

thing incongruous with the well-being of the moral

universe.

Had not man indeed been by his bodily organism and sensations somewhat akin to lower creatures, he would have been out of place in this world, and incapable of duly exercising his lordship over animals. He would have had no sympathy with the groaning of creation. But now we understand how the Divine covenant with man extends to lower creatures, as under him, and capable of suffering from and by him, though not of sinning with him. Hence we can be just towards animals, but not merciful. It is often said that the merciful man is merciful to his beast;' but that is a mistake. Beasts cannot commit crimes, and therefore they do not demand mercy. The sentence is,

The righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.' And what does that mean, but that the man who has the life of any creature dependent on his power cannot be righteous if he would abuse that power? And if by Divine appointment the life of any creature is suffered to be taken to sustain the life of man, it is because man should thereby be taught, as by the institution of sacrifice, that the guilty are to be saved not merely by the substitution of the innocent in their stead, but by learning how the guilty may become innocent by offering themselves in self-sacrifice and service when the Giver of life demands their whole being in devotion to Himself.

65

CHAPTER V.

THE MORALE OF MAN AND BRUTE.

THE assertion of our dignity on the ground of our own consciousness would not be admitted as an argument by the advocates of the transmutation theory; because, as they believe in no special creation beyond some unknown primordial germ, from which the first man was at last produced, as the terminal point of an immense series of animals, so they believe that there is but one kind of mind, and that, in fact, men and brutes are essentially one in nature, both mentally and physically. The difference, they say, between their own thinkings and those of creeping things, birds, and beasts, is only that of degree, not of kind, all the varieties of manifestation being dependent on bodily formation; or, rather, they deny that what we call mind is the manifestation of a distinct entity, acting with or upon certain conditions of material arrangement; and they assert that it is only a product of physical force, just like heat or electricity, thus confounding things essentially different-a being having consciousness and volition with a mere chemical agent. When they show us their thoughts in a test-tube,

F

and deal in ideas by weight and measure, or give us the quantitative analysis of their own brain and its products, we shall believe them, and not till then.

Now, as we do not pretend to know what either mind or matter essentially is, and as we cannot show minds either in a solid or a gaseous state, having, like matter, different qualities, chemical affinities, and so forth, we cannot demonstrate that man's mind is a different sort of thing, in that sense, from the mind of a mouse or a monkey. But we can show that it has different qualities and affinities of an intellectual and moral kind; and therefore, as we conclude from the different affinities of matter the difference between various kinds of matter, so we can infer from the affinities of different minds a difference in kind as well as degree. There is no other method of determining differences between things. What is matter but the manifestation of force? They exist together, they cannot be separated even by thought; we know nothing of physical force but by matter, nor of matter but as a form of force. The physical world is a world of forces or powers acting in harmonious co-operation. If matter be the manifestation of force, the forces themselves are but the manifestation of a Will that gave them laws under which they thus co-operate in all their correlations in a prescribed manner. Science cannot exorcise spiritpower out of nature; will in nature points to a Person, residing somewhere, who made nature.

But, in truth, do the transmutationists acknowledge any difference essentially between the forces of mind