ater phases
express more fully. Hence the triumphant march of evolution and the
assumption that whatever is later is necessarily better than what went
before. If a child were simply the partial expression of a man, his
single desire would be to grow up, and when he was grown up he would
embody all he had been striving for and would be happy for ever after.
So if man were nothing but a halting reproduction of divinity and
destined to become God, his whole destiny would be fulfilled by
apotheosis. If this apotheosis, moreover, were an actual future event,
something every man and animal was some day to experience, evolution
might really have a final goal, and might lead to a new and presumably
better sort of existence--existence in the eternal. Somewhat in this
fashion evolution is understood by the party that wish to combine it
with a refreshed patristic theology.

[Sidenote: The radical one.]

There is an esoteric way, however, of taking these matters which is more
in sympathy both with natural evolution and with transcendental
philosophy. If we assert that evolution is infinite, no substantive goal
can be set to it. The goal will be the process itself, if we could only
open our eyes upon its beauty and necessity. The apotheosis will be
retroactive, nay, it has already taken place. The insight involved is
mystical, yet in a way more just to the facts than any promise of
ulterior blisses. For it is not really true that a child has no other
ideal than to become a man. Childhood has many an ideal of its own, many
a beauty and joy irrelevant to manhood, and such that manhood is
incapable of retaining or containing them. If the ultimate good is
really to contain and retain all the others, it can hardly be anything
but their totality--the infinite history of experience viewed under the
form of eternity. At that remove, however, the least in the kingdom of
Heaven is even as the greatest, and the idea of evolution, as of time,
is "taken up into a higher unity." There could be no real pre-eminence
in one man's works over those of another; and if faith, or insight into
the equal service done by all, still seemed a substantial privilege
reserved for the elect, this privilege, too, must be an illusion, since
those who do not know how useful and necessary they are must be as
useful and necessary as those who do. An absolute preference for
knowledge or self-consciousness would be an unmistakably human and
finite ideal--something to