deprive man of his soul, assimilate him to the brutes to make him perform what brute nature never did perform, namely, _create_ faculty. Men have lives to laugh at the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, but methinks the doctrine of the progression to bodily beauty from monkeys without tails; of barbarians to civilized man without aid, is to the full as absurd; to say nothing of that comprehensive power of contemplation which enabled Newton to demonstrate the order of the universe, it would be very difficult to understand how abstract ideas could be latent in the soul of a monkey waiting development. Besides, by the theory of progression, during the time of which we have record, say six thousand years, men should be steadily on the _improve_--both as to arts, science, moral government, legal government, _self_-government, and bodily development; but we do not find it so. The ruins of Babylon, of Thebes, and of other great cities built soon after the flood, attest architectural skill among the ancients such as is hardly aimed at no. Callisthenes found astronomical tables reaching as far back as within a few years of the deluge, in the Temple of Belus, when he accompanied Alexander the Great on his expedition to the East. And many arts have been lost altogether that were well known to the ancients. The half-barbarian Copt erecting his hut amid the fallen pillars and statuary of ancient Thebes, the Mameluke riding recklessly and savagely amid the pyramids, that still remain to puzzle the assertor of progression even with the mere mechanical difficulties of the machinery used for {179} raising such immense stones to such a height and in such a plain, so distant from any known quarries. These are hut poor indications of the race advancing, though individual nations, worked on by a regenerative influence, may appear to make, nay do make, great improvements in all respects." "Do you, then, think that man's tendency is to degenerate?" asked Eugene. "Not necessarily, by any means," replied M. Bertolot; "but in proportion as he departs from the centre of unity, from the truths once imprinted on the soul of Adam, thence to be transmitted for human guidance, it will, I think, be found so." "But," said Eugene, "is Adam's religion yours? Surely he was not a Christian." "If not in name and with the same outward rites, yet in reality he must have been," replied the mentor. "There is but one truth, and the difference between his creed and ours was that he looked for a Redeemer to come. We believe in him as having come." "But was Adam's religion that of the Jews, then?" asked Eugene. "In creed and in spirit, yes. In form and observance it differed, because the Jews had typical forms specially given to them, alike to commemorate their deliverance from Egypt, and to typify their delivery through Christ from sin. They were living amid idolatrous nations, and the safeguard of a special ceremonial was needful to them."