My opponent seems to be perturbed in regard to the exact period in the development of the race, “the definite hour,” when man came into possession of a soul. To this question let us apply cold, merciless logic. The biologic history of the human race is recapitulated in the embryonic life of each individual. There are no difficulties in the way of determining at what precise period the soul was injected into the race-man that are not also met with in regard to the individual. My reverend friend, can you point out the “definite hour”--why not definite minute, or second?--when in your embryonic development you became possessed of a soul? And just three seconds before that event were you not in as woeful a plight as any soulless monkey that ever cooled himself by swinging to and fro, suspended from a leafy bough by means of his prehensile caudal appendage? Is it not possible that a little bit of envy of that large-souled race of the future does not mingle with your shame of an animal ancestry when you rise and exclaim, “Away with the theory of the upward trend in God’s works; I will none of it?”--for it is a fact that whatever sense of shame one may feel for our lowly ancestors it is more than compensated for by the pride one may feel for the noble race that is to be; because if the path along which we have travelled in past ages points downward in the rear, it just as surely points upward in front. Our destiny will be as high as our origin was low. And as man drops his foolish prejudices and grows more intelligent, as he learns more about the laws of his development, the more rapidly will he advance physically, mentally, spiritually. Ah! Parson, far better to be the tadpole ancestor of an ever-progressive angel breed than be the degraded descendant of a race of gods; yet a race without hope of ever again reaching the much-lauded, pristine purity and perfection of Adam--a creature really whose moral status was so low, and who was so weak, that he fell at the first temptation. Civilization, culture, the moral nature of man, have been developed; they are not the remains of something that has been lost. Human nature is not ruined, but is unfinished. The god-like race is not of the past, but belongs to the future. Man entered the zone of sin not from above, but from below. Probably no man who ever walked this earth save Jesus Christ has ever breathed the pure moral atmosphere above the zone of sin. Through this zone, from the pre-human to the man of Galilee, from the sinless state of the lower animals and of the child-man to the sinless perfection of the divine, the whole race, ’mid struggles and trials and sorrows and anguish, must pass, is passing. NATURAL SELECTION AND FUTURE PROGRESS