e gradual increase, and the gradual conquest of good over
that which was in existence before.

There is no fall of man, then, there is no conscious and purposeful
rebellion against God to be accounted for, there is no need of any
devil to explain the facts. He is only an encumbrance, only in the way,
only makes it difficult and practically impossible to solve our
problem.

The old story was that, after the rebellion, pain and death and all
evil came into the human world; and the natural world was blighted.
Thorns and briers and thistles sprang up on every hand; and animals
which before had been peaceful began to fight and destroy each other.
We all know this to be a childish myth, and pagan. The actual history
of the world has been something entirely other than that.

Now I do not wish that you should suppose that I minimize evil, that I
make light of sin, that I do not properly estimate the cruelties and
the wrongs that have devastated the world. I need only suggest to you
that you look in this direction and that to see how hideous all these
evils may be; how bitter, how cruel, is the fruit of wrong thoughts and
of wrong actions. Look at a man, for example, divine in the
possibilities of his being, but through vice, through drink, through
habits of one kind and another, corrupted until it is an insult to a
brute to call him brutal. We do not deny all this. Notice the cruelties
of men towards each other, the jealousies, the envies, the strifes, the
warfares. How one class looks down upon and treats with contempt
another that is a little lower! How masters have used their slaves; how
tyrants like Nero and Caligula have made themselves hideous spectacles
of what is possible to humanity, on a stage that is world-wide and
illuminated by the flash-lights of history!

I do not wish you to suppose for a moment that I belittle, that I
underestimate these evils, only we do not need anything other than the
scientific and historic facts of the world in order to account for
them. What is sin, as science looks at it and treats it? Not something
consciously and purposely developed, not something originating in a
rebellion in some other world than this. It seems to me that we can
very easily account for it when we recognize that man has been
gradually coming up from the lower orders of life, and that he still
has in him the snake and the hyena, the wolf, the tiger, the bear, all
the wild, fierce passions of the animal world only p