When we look upon the living world as revealed in the geologic record, we still see a kind of welter and chaos, but we also see the advent of new principles not entirely subject to mechanical and mathematical laws. Life goes its way and takes liberties with its physical environment. Living bodies change and develop as the non-living do not. The various organic forms “rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves,” and incalculably slow transformations of lower forms into higher take place, but not without appalling delays and waste and suffering. Chemical and mechanical laws are still in full force, but they appear to be in the service of a new principle; an organizing tendency of a new kind is at work in the world; chance and necessity seem to play a less conspicuous part. Yet there is nothing that meets our idea of justice, or mercy, or economy of effort. For millions upon millions of years the earth swarmed with low, all but brainless creatures. The monsters of sea and land that appeared in the middle period were huge and terrible in body and limb, but very small in capacity of brain. Huge ganglions, or knots of nervous tissue, in different parts of their bodies seem to have served as a substitute for a centralized brain and a complex nervous system. The brontosaurus, seventy feet long, with a body weighing many tons, had a brain not much larger than a man’s double fists. Brains as yet played a very subordinate part in the world. Reptiles and half-reptiles possessed the earth. The age of mammals was as yet only hinted at. But after long geologic ages, mammals came to the front, holding the precious possibility of man, and reptiles were relegated to the rear. The animal brain increased, wit began to get the better of brute force, and the small and feeble ancestors of man appeared in the biological drama. They were like small and timid supernumeraries skulking or hiding on the wings of the stage. Lemurs and monkeys appeared long before there were any signs of the anthropoid apes, and the anthropoid apes were in evidence long before the first rude man appeared. In all the vast stretch of geologic and biologic time, do we see any evidence of the active existence of the God and the Devil of our fathers? Not unless we identify them with the material forces that then ruled and shaped the world, and these forces, by any other name, are of the same impersonal, impartial, unforgiving character as is disclosed in our dealings with them to-day.