and so far as the existing generation is concerned. Then the lower
organic life of the world is also so far complete. God, through
Evolution or otherwise, may still have finishing touches to add here and
there, but already it is "all very good." It is difficult to conceive
anything better of its kind than a lily or a cedar, an ant or an
ant-eater. These organisms, so far as we can judge, lack nothing. It
might be said of them, "they are complete in Nature." Of man also, of
man the animal, it may be affirmed that his Environment satisfies him.
He has food and drink, and good food and good drink. And there is in him
no purely animal want which is not really provided for, and that
apparently in the happiest possible way.

But the moment we pass beyond the mere animal life we begin to come upon
an incompleteness. The symptoms at first are slight, and betray
themselves only by an unexplained restlessness or a dull sense of want.
Then the feverishness increases, becomes more defined, and passes slowly
into abiding pain. To some come darker moments when the unrest deepens
into a mental agony of which all the other woes of earth are
mockeries--moments when the forsaken soul can only cry in terror for the
Living God. Up to a point the natural Environment supplies man's wants,
beyond that it only derides him. How much in man lies beyond that point?
Very much--almost all, all that makes man man. The first suspicion of
the terrible truth--so for the time let us call it--wakens with the
dawn of the intellectual life. It is a solemn moment when the
slow-moving mind reaches at length the verge of its mental horizon, and,
looking over, sees nothing more. Its straining makes the abyss but more
profound. Its cry comes back without an echo. Where is the Environment
to complete this rational soul? Men either find one--_One_--or spend the
rest of their days in trying to shut their eyes. The alternatives of the
intellectual life are Christianity or Agnosticism. The Agnostic is right
when he trumpets his incompleteness. He who is not complete in Him must
be forever incomplete. Still more grave becomes man's case when he
begins further to explore his moral and social nature. The problems of
the heart and conscience are infinitely more perplexing than those of
the intellect. Has love no future? Has right no triumph? Is the
unfinished self to remain unfinished? Again, the alternatives are two,
Christianity or Pessimism. But when we ascend the fu