de--to believe that the
monkey is a degenerate man as that man is an improved monkey.

It has often been pointed out as evidence of man's fall that he is the
only created thing that does not live up to his possibilities. In plant
and bird and beast there is no disobedience--all fulfill the purpose of
their creation, from the flower, that puts forth its bloom as perfectly
when it "wastes its sweetness on the desert air" as when in the garden
its beauty calls forth expressions of delight, to the bird that wakes
the echoes of trackless forests with its melody. Man, only man, mocks
his Maker by prostituting to evil the powers that might lift him within
sight of the throne of God.

If so many men and women fall _now_, in spite of light and love and all
the incentives to noble living, is it incredible that the first pair
should have fallen when the race was young? Possibility becomes
probability when we remember that the conflict that rages between the
mind and the heart is the one real conflict in every life. Reason versus
faith is the great issue to-day as in Eden. Faith says obey; reason
asks, Why? The one looks up confidingly to a Power above; the other
relies on self and rejects even the authority of Jehovah unless the
finite mind can comprehend the plan of the Infinite.

No one will doubt the doctrine of original sin if he will study nature
and then analyze himself. In the plant, in the animal and in the
physical man, the invisible thing which we call life is the only
sustaining force; when it takes its flight, that which remains falls
back to the earth and becomes dust. And so the spiritual in man is the
only force that can give him a moral nature and preserve it from decay;
when his spiritual life departs the mind as well as the body rots.

Some find a stumbling block in the doctrine of the Atonement. That one
should suffer for others, shocks their sense of justice, they say, and
yet that is the law of life. Each generation borrows from generations
past and pays the debt to the generations that follow. A certain
percentage of the mothers die in childbirth--evidence that they are
God's handiwork is found in the fact they so willingly enter the valley
of the shadow of death to attain to motherhood. Many a boy has been won
back to rectitude by the sorrows of a parent; we are not infrequently
healed by the stripes that fall on others. In fact, great wrongs are
seldom righted without the shedding of innocent blood--one