When I began, I spoke for a moment as though use and ornament were opposite or separate principles; but what I shall hope soon to show is that they are so interlocked and combined that there is no keeping them apart when once the spirit of man has opened to perceive the true sacramental service which springs from their union, and the social discordance that inevitably follows upon their divorce. But as man’s ordinary definition of the word “use” is sadly material and debased, and as his approval and sanction of the joys of life have too often been limited by a similar materialism of thought, one is obliged, for the time being, to accept the ordinary limiting distinction, so that the finer and less realised uses of beauty and delight may be shown more clearly as the true end to which all lesser uses should converge. Life itself is a usage of material, the bringing together of atoms into form; and we know, from what science teaches of evolution, that this usage has constantly been in the direction of forms of life which, for certain reasons, we describe as “higher.” Emerging through those forms have come manifestations or qualities, which quite obviously give delight to the holders of them; and we are able to gather in watching them, as they live, move, and have their being, that for them life seems good. It is no part of their acceptance of what has come that they are here not to enjoy themselves. Thus we see from the upward trend of creation a faculty for enjoyment steadily emerging, and existing side by side with fears, risks, and hardships which the struggle for existence entails--probably an even increased faculty for enjoyment, as those fears and risks become more consciously part of their lives. And I question whether we should think that the wild deer had chosen well, could it resign its apprehension of death at the drinking-place for the sake of becoming a worm--the wriggling but scarcely conscious prey of the early bird. Man (the most conscious prey of death) has also his compensations; but, wishing to eat his cake and have it, he insists that his increased self-consciousness is the hall-mark of an immortality which he is unwilling to concede to others. He sees (or the majority of those see, who preach personal immortality after death) no moral necessity for conceding immortality to the worm because the early bird cuts short its career, or to the wild deer because it enjoys life, shrinks from death, and endures pain; or to the peewit, because she loves her young; or to the parrot, because it dies with a vocabulary still inadequate for expressing that contempt for the human species with which the caged experience of a life-time has filled its brain. Yet, for these and similar reasons applied to himself, man thinks that immortality is his due.