have a uniformity of human nature and of human love corresponding to the uniformity of the Divine. Progress is the process of its elimination. If we turn from the human to the pre-human period of evolution, the first immediate fact which strikes us is that there has been throughout the animal kingdom an evolution of mind, which has resulted in providing man with the psychological apparatus necessary for conceiving, and, to some extent, realising the ideal. When we reached the age of reflection, we woke up to find that our psychological mechanism had been running for some years in certain grooves. We now find that its direction can be traced back by evolution to the beginnings of animal consciousness. If, however, we believe that the evolution of mind, animal and human, has been a process of progress, we do so not on the ground that mind has been evolved, but that its evolution has been in the direction of those ideals, approximation to which is believed by us to be progress. Similarly, if the pre-animal period of the earth's evolution is shown by science to have resulted in fitting the earth to be the home of animal life, we judge that evolution to have been progress, not because it prepared the world eventually for man, but because it is seen to have been part of the process by which the ideal is in course of realisation, by which the Divine purpose is in the course of being fulfilled. The only value that we can assign to the pre-human period of evolution is that which attaches to it as a means to an end; but though we believe that by striving after the ideals revealed to us we are labouring towards that end, and though everything that makes for the ideal contributes to the end, yet we do not know the Divine purpose, and we cannot say in what manifold other ways the pre-human period may have subserved that purpose. It is sufficient if we can trace the steps by which this one portion, the only portion known to us, of the whole design has been carried forward. This reflection is one which it is necessary to bear in mind when considering the alleged wastefulness of the process of evolution and the price at which progress has been purchased.