If we should stand amid the uncovered treasures which mark the site of ancient Nineveh or Babylon we would doubtless find in the objects, as they are this moment, very much to engage our most interested attention. We would regard with wonder and pleasure the specimens of beautiful architecture, the evidences of human skill and industry which modern exploration has disclosed to view. And yet, full of interest as such an occupation would be, we could not prevent our minds from engaging in another. Without any conscious exercise of will, our thought would revert to the day when these fallen structures stood in all their magnificence; when these halls, now filled with the sand of the desert, echoed to the strains of music and to the voices of the noblest and greatest of the land; when through these arches, now crumbling, armies marched gaily to battle, or returned in triumph, bearing the spoils of conquest. We would not be insensible to the value of the columns and capitals, the statuary and tablets before our eyes, and yet the very grandeur of these ruins would evoke the genius who would lead our thought by an irresistible constraint to look upon the prior vision of those cities in the day of their pristine perfection. My friends, we do stand amid ruins. We walk day after day amid shattered greatness, in comparison with which the prized relics of Nineveh and Babylon, of Thebes, and Luxor,[1] and Troy, sink into insignificance. Far be it from me to underestimate the work of man, as we see him and know him to-day, or as we read of him in the records of the past. I am aware of what he is, and of what he has done. I am not insensible to his work, and yet I declare that man, great as he is—and he is great—is in certain respects not as great as he was. I mean that he is not what the progenitor of the race was. And viewed in comparison with that primitive condition—that condition at creation—man to-day, considered physically, intellectually, morally and spiritually, is a conspicuous instance of fallen grandeur—not worthless and valueless—far from that; but his perfection has departed; he is vastly inferior to what his great original was. Realizing this, we can not fail to revert in thought to that early day, and seek to see what the greatness was from which we have fallen. Before, however, we attempt to look upon that picture, it will be necessary to establish and defend the theory of man’s condition and history upon this earth, with which it is inseparably connected.