r sex which might have derogated from its perfection as a type
of pure humanity. In those days I believed in revelation. But my
argument was not from revelation, but from ethics and history. The
undertaking of Christianity to convert mankind to a fraternal and
purely beneficent type of character and enfold men in a universal
brotherhood, baffled and perverted although the effort has been in
various ways, appears to have no parallel in ethical history. There is
none in the Greek philosophers or the Roman Stoics, high as some of
them may soar in their way. Aristotle's ideal man is perfect in its
statuesque fashion, but it is not fraternal; it is not even
philanthropic. Nor does the Christian character or the effort to
create it depart with belief in dogma. Do not men who have totally
renounced the dogma still cultivate a character in its gentleness and
benevolence essentially Christian?

Theory, I have none. I plead, on a footing with the nine thousand
correspondents of the _Daily Telegraph_ of London, for thoroughgoing
allegiance to the truth, emancipation of the clerical intellect from
tests, and comprehension in the inquiry not only of the material, but
of the higher or spiritual nature of man, including his aspiration to
progress, of which there cannot be said to be any visible sign in
brutes, whatever rudiments of human faculties and affections they may
otherwise display. But though I have no theory, I cannot help having a
conception, and my present conception of the historical relation of
Christianity and its Founder to humanity and human progress does not
seem to me to be so different from what it was half a century ago as
when I came to compare the two I expected to find it. It seems to me
still that history is a vast struggle, with varying success, toward the
attainment of moral perfection, of which, if the advent of Christianity
furnished the true ideal, it may be deemed in a certain sense a
revelation. Assuredly it may if in this most mysterious world there
is, beneath all the conflict of good with evil, a spirit striving
toward good and destined in the end to prevail. If there is not such a
spirit, if all is matter and chance, we, can only say, What a spectacle
is History!

January 20th, 1907.

III.

THE SCOPE OF EVOLUTION.

In discussing the ground of ethical science some writers appear to hold
that evolution explains all; but surely the illustrious discoverer of
evolution never c