“If the soul was slowly evolved, and if that long-tailed monkey who squatted upon the lower branches of your ancestral tree had a piece of a soul, and you should meet that poor little piece of a soul in the future land of spirits, wouldn’t you be ‘sorter’ ashamed on the morning after the Resurrection to walk up to it and say, ‘Howdy, Grandpa?’ “You may boast that your grandfather was a monkey, your great-grandfather a bullfrog, and your great-great-grandfather a wiggletail but I claim for mine no such illustrious ancestry.” Well, that settles it! To save our pride--or our vanity rather--I suppose we’ll have to shut our eyes to the evidences and reject evolution. After all, perhaps the world’s greatest thinkers have been following the wrong trail in the pursuit of truth; instead of weighing the evidence for and against a theory they should have adopted the infinitely simpler plan of deciding it according to whether or not we like it! All anti-evolutionists find it necessary to appeal to our pride of ancestry to hold us to an ancient dogma. Even Mr. Bryan regards this appeal to petty personal vanity as legitimate argument against evolution. How they hate to give up the ennobling idea that we are the degraded descendants of a perfect, god-like pair! Are the lower animals so very inferior to man because, as my friend says, they cannot originate an idea? Lots of us higher animals could plead guilty to the same charge; and, what is worse, two or three generations must pass before the majority of us will even seriously consider an idea some one else originated--even when all the facts are for, and none against it. It is not necessary to bridge every gulf between man and amoeba to prove evolution. If all gaps between species were filled with “links” as thick as down on a goose’s feather then all creatures from Shakespeare to angle worms would belong to the same species. In that case all animals would be either poets or fishbait. I know of no reason why man evolved from a lower mammal could not have acquired a soul just as easily as if he were fashioned directly from a batch of mud. And I infer from that sublime paragraph of my reverend friend’s closing with the touching salutation, “Howdy, Grandpa,”--whoop-ee!--that his idea of heaven is that it is just about as stagnant a place as he believes this world to be. May not poor little stunted souls--if there are such there--be permitted to unfold and develop in the genial environment of the realm of the blest?