"No one ventures to deny, at the present day, that every human being grows from the egg _in utero_, just as a dog or a monkey does; the facts are before us and can be scrutinised in detail. We may ask of those who refuse to admit the gradual and natural development of man's consciousness in the ancestral series, passing from ape-like forms into indubitable man, 'How do you propose to divide the series presented by every individual man in his growth from the egg? At what particular phase in the embryonic series is the soul with its consciousness implanted? Is it in the egg? in the foetus of this month or that? in the new-born infant? or at five years of age?' This, it is notorious, is a point upon which churches have never been able to agree; and it is equally notorious that the unbroken series exists--that the egg becomes the foetus, the foetus the child, and the child the man. On the other hand we have the historical series--the series, the existence of which is inferred by Darwin and his adherents. This is a series leading from simple egg-like organisms to ape-like creatures, and from these to man. Will those who cannot answer our previous inquiries undertake to assert dogmatically in the present case at what point in the historical series there is a break or division? At what step are we to be asked to suppose that the order of nature was stopped, and a non-natural soul introduced?... The theologian is content in the case of individual development of the egg to admit the fact of individual evolution, and to make assumptions which lie altogether outside the region of scientific inquiry. So, too, it would seem only reasonable that he should deal with the historical series, and frankly accept the natural evolution of man from lower animals, declaring dogmatically, if he so please, but not as an inference of the same order as are the inferences of science, that something called the soul arrived at any point in the series which he may think suitable. At the same time, it would appear to be sufficient even for the purposes of the theologian, to hold that whatever the two above-mentioned series of living thing contain or imply, they do so as the result of a natural and uniform process of development, that there has been one 'miracle' once and for all time.... "The difficulties which the theologian has to meet when he is called upon to give some account of the origin and nature of the soul certainly cannot be said to have been increased by the establishment of the Darwinian theory. For from the earliest days of the Church, ingenious speculation has been lavished on the subject.