All scholars, for example, as bearing on this I will give you just this one illustration, know that there was a civilization in Egypt, wide- spread, highly developed, with nobody knows how many ages of growth behind it, there was this civilization in Egypt before the world was created according to the popular chronology that has been generally received until within a few years. We know that man has been on the earth hundreds of thousands of years. This is the next point in that story. In the next place, they tell us a wondrous tale of the origin and nature of man, tracing his natural development from lower forms of life. When I say "natural," I do not wish you to think for one moment that I leave out the divinity; for, according to this story of the world which I am hinting and outlining now, God is infinitely nearer, more wonderfully in contact with us, than he ever was in the old. Natural, then, but divine at every step, so that we are seeing God face to face, if we but think of it, and are feeling his touch every moment of our lives. No fall of man, then, on this theory. No invasion of this world by any form of evil or any evil person from without. This story of the fall of man came into the world undoubtedly to account in some philosophical fashion for the existence of pain, of evil, and of death. We account for it on this new theory much more naturally, rationally, more honorably for God, more hopefully for man. The history of the world, then, since man began has not been by any means a history of universal progression. Evolution, however much it may be misunderstood and misrepresented, does not mean the necessity of progress on the part of any one person or any one people, any more, for example, than the growth of the human body is inconsistent with the fact that cells and composite parts of the body are in process of decay and dissolution every hour, every moment of our lives. Nations grow, advance, if they comply with the laws, the conditions, of growth and advance; and, if not, they die out and disappear. And so is it of individuals. But, on the other hand, in the presence of the loving, lifting, leading God, humanity in the larger sense has been advancing from the beginning of human history until to-day; and the grade, dim glimpses of which we gain as we look out toward the future, is still up and still on.