elf-sacrificing; can take delight in
society: and some can even organise it, and thus enter on a kind of
civilisation. The dog and the horse, man's faithful servants and
companions, show emotions and affections rising as far as mere emotions
and affections can rise to the human level. Ants show an advance in the
arts of life well comparable to our own. If the bare animal nature is
thus capable of such high attainments by the mere working of natural
forces, it is to be expected that similar forces in mankind should be
found to work under similar laws. We are not spiritual beings only, we
are animals, and whatever nature has done for other animals we may
expect it to have done and to be doing for us. And if their nature is
capable of evolution, so too should ours be. And the study of such
evolution of our own nature is likely to be of the greatest value. This
nature is the main instrument, put into the grasp as it were of that
spiritual faculty which is our inmost essence, to be used in making our
whole life an offering to God. It is good to know what can be done with
this instrument and what cannot; how it has been formed in the past, and
may be still further formed for the future. It is good to study the
evolution of humanity. But all this does not touch the spiritual faculty
itself, nor the Moral Law which that faculty proclaims to us. The
essence of that law is its universality; and out of all this
development, when carried to its very perfection, the conception of such
universality cannot be obtained. Nothing in this evolution ever rises to
the height of a law which shall bind even God Himself and enable Abraham
to say, 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' The very word
right in this, its fulness of meaning, cannot be used.

Evolution may lead the creature to say what is hateful and what is
loveable, what is painful and what is delightful, what is to be feared
and what is to be sought; it may develope the sentiment which comes
nearest of all to the sentiment of reverence, namely, the sentiment of
shame; but it cannot reveal the eternal character of the distinction
between right and wrong. Nay, there may be, as was pointed out in the
last Lecture, an evolution in our knowledge even of the Moral Law, just
as there is an evolution in our knowledge of mathematics. The fulness of
its meaning can become clearer and ever clearer as generation learns
from generation. But the principle of the Moral Law, its univers