are striking differentiae which demand profound
consideration. Animals come into the world with the knowledge of their
ancestors. The beaver knows just what its ancestors knew before the
flood. It is born into the world with that transmitted knowledge. Its
posterity will know no more during the millennium. On the contrary, man
is born into the world an intellectual blank. However wise his parents,
he inherits not one idea. He knows absolutely nothing except what he
learns--learns from teachers and by experience. It would be
incomprehensibly strange if man in his development from a mollusk,
should accumulate inherited knowledge till he reaches the _ne plus
ultra_ of terrestrial life, and then by a sudden break in the chain of
nature lose it all, and come into the world a born fool!! This would be
"development," "natural selection," and the "survival of the fittest,"
with a vengeance! Here is a chasm between man and the lower animals,
made by the hand of God, that human wisdom can never bridge.

In his intellectual, moral and spiritual development, man starts from
zero. God has thus ordained it. He is dependent on progression for all
that he is and all that he is to be. God simply gives him a start in
this world, with the numberless ages of eternity before him for
infinite advancement. The idea, therefore, that "death ends all" nips
in the bud this grand conception of man's greatness, and blights
forever that which is noblest and truest in his nature. To regard this
life as the _ne plus ultra_ of man's development, is to charge nature
with a freak of folly, and an abortion in her best works. Men may laud
human virtue for human virtue's sake; but if man is but the moth of a
day, the fire-fly whose phosphorescent light flashes for a moment and
then goes out in eternal night, his virtues are but the tales of the
hour that have their value in the telling. If this life is all there is
of man, then he is the most unmeaning portion of the creation of God.
There is for him no perfection, no satisfying of his inherent wants,
and the whole of his existence is a sham and a fraud. As Young has
beautifully said:

"How poor, how rich, how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful, is man!
How passing wonder He who made him such!
Who centered in our make such strange extremes,
From different natures marvelously mixed,
Connection exquisite of distant worlds!
Distinguished link in being's endless cha