but think of God, may not have had an origin without the intervention of chimpanzees, orangs, and gorillas, as the source of their limbs, brains, and beauty. What is it in the human mind that thus denies the law of God written in the heart, which yet constrains men to obey it as good citizens, honest men, good husbands, and fathers?"

M. Carl Vogt vouches for the fact that he and his friends are such characters, but he concludes his work on man by evidence that he mistakes what kind of men true Christians really are. He says: They require the fear of punishment, the hope of reward in a dreamt-of beyond, to keep in the right-for us suffices the consciousness of being men amongst men, and the acknowledgment of their equal rights. We have no other hope than that of receiving the acknowledgments of our fellow-men; no other fear than that of seeing our human dignity violated-a dignity we value the more since it bas been conquered with the greatest labour by us and our ancestors, down to apes.'* A conquest without intention! The greatest labour without a purpose! Equal rights without equal sense of right and wrong! Alas! there is the unreason of a passionate confusion in these unamiable sentences, O Vogt. We and they are here treated as if of diverse genera; but surely the existence of those who fear pain, hope for joy, and dream of a world beyond this, as much demands explanation as that of any who have learned to value the dignity conquered for them by their ancestors down to apes. For

* P. 469.

if to be very personal-thou, Carl Vogt, be conscious of thy human rights, with no other hope than that of being acknowledged as a man, and no other fear but lest thy dignity should be offended, this fear and hope being only the natural result of the struggle of ape-nature to acquire human dignity, the hope, fear, and dream of the beyond, charged against the poor pusillanimous party, must have the same simian origin as thy hopes and fears, that is to say, if thy theory of development and apeconquest be true. Thou hast only to prove that such hopes and fears, with the sense of human rights, personal dignity, and moral responsibility, are derived from the ancestry thou claimest, to secure the universal acknowledgment of thine immense genius as a man and a discoverer. But is not the dignity for which thou fearest rather to be called thy self-opinion?

The dignity of human beings would be but of very diminutive value at the best if, when a man stood before his fellows as consciously most worthy of the honour he claimed, he abruptly ended by falling altogether into the grave. In short, the world has never heard of the true dignity of man but in connection with the faith that brought life and immortality to light, and said, 'Honour all men.' God, the faithful Creator, is theirs for ever. So we believe that Vogt, like some others, has perverted science under the blinding influence of prejudice, arising from ignorance of Christianity, which is nothing but love, Divine and human, and is essentially justice, because it cannot endure that men should wrong one another; but while

embracing the penitent as one escaped from the death in sin, it repels the wilfully wicked as selfish, cruel, and deadly. Therefore Christians pray that all men may feel the truth and power of Christ, and escape what is false and destructive, such as the science that excludes God from His own works and leaves man without hope but from man. The conflict of opinion amongst those who believe themselves the ultimates of some anthropoid 'primate' leaves it undetermined whether mankind sprang from one species of extinct ape or from several, and, of course, we shall not be able, on their ground, to decide the question as to the unity of the human race, until they have completed their enquiry and agreed concerning the results. In the meantime, we had arrived at a conclusion on other ground, and even imagined that we had at least the Book of Genesis in favour of our views. But, according to the mode of interpretation adopted by the advocates of another strange theory, it appears that the language of the Bible is rather favourable to the notion of several distinct origins of man. Those who maintain this notion

are also divided in opinion; some implying, if not asserting, several direct creations of man; while others seem, like Vogt, to discover sufficient reasons for the existence of the various races of man in the fact that there are various classes of apes from which, as they imagine, the human races may have been developed.

The unity of the human race, however, is still affirmed, because the most scientific anatomists and ethnologists believe they find proofs in their respective

departments that human nature is unique, and only of one genus and species. To assume that one species to

have resulted from the blending of men from an inde

⚫ finite number of centres, or from successive creations, would be both presumptuous and unscientific. Those writers who have obtained some credit and more notoriety by asserting that the families of mankind are of various origins have also laboured to prove that they have so little actual relationship in their natural structure and functions as to be incapable of intermingling; and, of course, those writers have consistently contradicted all who, from their knowledge of anatomy and ethnology, believe that all mankind is of one species. But as they have not yet shown any species of ape adapted to produce any kind of man, nor attempted to point to any lines of demarcation existing between the various races of man and precluding their intermarriage, such writers affirming their belief in such things may reasonably be referred to their studies and be left, with what skill they may, to carry out their enquiries. Even Vogt, while contending for diversified simian origins of man, yet acknowledges that there is a unity in mankind at present, which he attributes to their having so freely mingled together. But it is obvious that if the present unity have resulted from the intermingling of the different races so-called it is certainly quite as possible that those races have arisen from one origin, and become diverse by the circumstances attending their dispersion from one centre.

Thinking men, without faith in the Bible, will of

a

course endeavour to explain the existence and peculiarity of man according to the light that is in them, and by the help of whatever amount of science they may possess. So far from deprecating their endeavours, we should be free to thank them for whatever truth they can bring to our knowledge, for all truths are Divine and intended to be known and applied. The grand difficulty is to distinguish a reality from a mistake, when this is disguised under the seeming scientific garb with which ingenious thinkers are so apt to clothe the conceptions of their fancy. True science will bear the severest testing, but we shall find that much that passes under the name of science is founded only on erroneous judgment and partial observation of facts, leading to outrageous assumptions, and to inferences involving unlimited confusion. Those who have recently, with so much skill, propounded their views in respect to the origination of man, and his antiquity on the earth, we believe, from patient intimacy with their writings, have honestly bewildered themselves and equally bewildered others by their hasty temerity in assuming possibilities when finding a deficiency in the supply of such facts as were required for their theories. Mr. Darwin and Sir C. Lyell somewhat obscurely intimate their desire to discriminate between their speculations and their actual science, but many of their disciples not possessed of their tact and learning fail to observe the distinction. Hence a kind of smaller philosophers are now prevalent who think they believe, as they teach, that man was verily, in some remote era, in the immeasurable ages,