zöon up to man, only as so many steps toward man, and not each good in itself, even as each successive stage in a delightful journey which brings us to some happy goal. "It is not the goal, but the course, that makes us happy," said Jean Paul. Nay, but in this matter it is both the course and goal.

The dignity of human nature is not in the least impeached by these considerations of the connections and resemblances of animal and human life. Man is a cup which the Eternal Power has had for many million years upon his wheel and 'neath his moulding hand. Therein I read, in part, the worth and dignity of what has taken shape and beauty from his plastic stress. Whatever the Eternal might have done, what he has done is plain enough. He has taken millions and billions of years to bring forth man from the ascidian,-about half a million from the time when first he fairly got him on his feet to bring him to his present amplitude of life. And have we not a perfect right in the long way that we have come to find a hint and prophecy of the long way we are to go? As yet we have not reached the half-way house upon the mountain of our great endeavor. The highest summits that now beckon us are only foot-hills to that top and crown on which humanity shall be transfigured into the image of that glory which it had in the beginning before the world was with God. Nay, but we cannot think of any possible achievement that shall end the endless quest.

"The sun is but a morning star."

Now, there are those who find no deduction from

the dignity of human nature in the past history of the race who confess themselves staggered by the prospect which speculative astronomy opens to their view; that is, the prospect of an ultimate collapse of our whole mundane order, the degeneration of the earth to the condition of the moon,

"A gray, wide, lampless, dim, unpeopled world,"

throwing itself at length in sheer despair upon the fiery bosom of the sun. This prospect, it must be confessed, does not agree with the idea that in a perfected humanity upon the earth we have a sufficient substitute for personal immortality. This prospect resolves the spectacle of universal life into the play of children on a sandy beach, who comfort one another by singing as they work,

"Perhaps, if we hurry very much,

And don't lose a minute of the day,
There'll be time for the last lovely touch
Before the sea sweeps it all away.”

In the phrase of Omar Khayyám, the caravan would
reach "the nothing it set out from." But, if that
were so, we should not cry with Omar Khayyám,
"Oh, make haste!" No, as the disciples said to
Jesus, "It is good for us to be here." Such a pros-
pect does not impeach the dignity of human nature,
but it does impeach the husbandry of heaven. The
Scotch woman, asked what she would say to God's
damning her forever, answered, "An' if he does,
he'll lose mair than I do." If the prophecy of the
speculative astronomers is made good, and there be

no personal immortality, God will lose more than we shall by the transaction. We shall have had our day,

our love and laughter, our sunshine and sweet rain, our work and rest; and "we know that what has been was good." But can God afford such prodigal destruction of his work? Why not? there are so many stars in heaven. But without personal immortality, unless our speculative astronomers are "all wranglers and all wrong," there will come a time when the whole process of terrestrial development will be as if it had never been. So help me God, I can no otherwise than think some better thing of him than that. And, if the speculative astronomers are right, then we have one great, sad reason more for an unconquerable hope and stout assurance of a spiritual immortality that shall justify the ruin of the physical environment in which the soul has nourished for a time its half-unconscious life.

Another challenge to the dignity of human nature has come from those for whom the greatening universe and the greater God which it implies have dwarfed mankind into a hopeless relative insignificance. What said the Psalmist? "When I consider the heavens the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man?" And if the Psalmist was so impressed, how much more must be the modern man, for whom the heavens are so much more vast and wonderful than they could be for him? But pari passu with the enlargement of the sidereal universe there has been an enlargement of humanity. It is man who has

read the secrets of the heavens. He has weighed the stars as in his hand. He has measured them as And hence he is more

with a surveyor's chain. wonderful than they.

“Thou gazest on the stars, my soul: *

Oh, would that I might be

Yon starry skies, with thousand eyes,
That I might gaze on thee!"

Moreover, it is evident from our latest studies that we are as far from fathoming the mysteries of the human brain and mind as we are from fathoming the mysteries of the heavens. And when to the mysterious greatness of the mind we add on the one hand the wonder and beauty of the physical organism, and on the other the tragedies of misplaced and disappointed and the exaltations of triumphant love, the heroisms and devotions of the moral life, the splendors of the imagination, the trust of broken hearts which cry, "Though the Lord slay me, yet will I trust in him!"-if we cannot "still suspect and still revere ourselves," still front with unabashed demeanor the greater universe and the greater God which science has revealed, it is because we have not individually the mind to enter into and appropriate the most obvious meaning of the things that press upon us day and night.

The apostle promised those to whom he wrote that they should be like God, for they should "see him as he is." "We are like him," rejoins our mod

"My love" in the original. I am indebted for the variant to Dr. Horatio Stebbins, and think it a stroke of genius.

ern thought, "because we do see him as he is." All genuine appreciation means a common mind. It is so between man and man. No Shakspere or Rembrandt or Beethoven in you, and no appreciation of their glorious art. It is so between man and God. An intelligible universe must be intelligent. The converse of the proposition is as true. The order of our notions and ideas means the order of the universe; and our apprehension of that order means, as Channing said, that "all minds are of one family," that we have the mind of God, and by that sign are now the sons of God, and not merely in some future tense.

"Were not the eye itself a sun,

No light for it could ever shine:

By nothing Godlike could the soul be won,
Were not the soul itself divine."

The power in us to read the laws, to hear the harmonies, to appreciate the beauty of the world, is proof of our celestial mind as absolute and glorious as we can ask or dream.

So, then, having attended to each separate challenge that our doctrine of the dignity of human nature has received from modern thought, we may, I think, conclude that the doctrine of the dignity of human nature has suffered no detriment, no diminution, from the changes that have taken place in men's conceptions of the universe and human origins during the last half-century. The more we know of geology and biology and anthropology and archæology, the more significant and grand must