‘I will give thanks unto Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: Wonderful are Thy works; And that my soul knoweth right well. My frame was not hidden from Thee, When I was made in secret, And curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see mine unperfect substance; And in Thy book were all my members written, Which day by day were fashioned, When as yet there was none of them.’[38] [Footnote 38: Ps. cxxxix. vers. 14-16.] By what link man is united physically to the great series below him, by what line and in what specific manner he arose, it has not yet been given to science to determine. Biological science sees, with inevitable certainty, that he must have been in vital union with that series; that physically he is a part of the majestic organic whole, from the first dawn of life upon the globe until now. At the same time it is equally certain that other agencies which could not have acted on ape or other mammal, nor indeed on any other living form besides, came into operation, when man, as such, became an inhabitant of this earth. Nor is it by any means other than conceivable that science, which has transformed the face of the world in fifty years, may be able to demonstrate the actual physical line of man’s origin. But if that be so, if the line along which man’s physical nature was moulded of the dust of the ground, by the Creative Mind and will, were made so plain that none could refuse the evidence, it may leave undisturbed our mental peace, and unaltered our conviction of the dignity and majesty of man. It would leave our responsibilities undiminished, our rights uninfringed, and our hopes unclouded. The saint is none the less saintly, because he is ancestrally the last, and prevised outcome, of an inconceivably grand progression of creative laws, operating through countless cycles, than he would have been, as the descendant of a man produced by an isolated act of creation. The song of the nightingale is no iota less rich in fluent melody because its larynx was modified from less melodious forms; and the martyrdom of Paul, or the noble sacrifices of heroes and reformers to secure the sacred rights of liberty and truth for their fellow-men, are none the less exalted because we must trace their ancestry to the slow operation of creative laws, which in the great unbroken stream of life upon the earth gave origin to the monod, the coral-polyp, the mollusc, the lizard, the aye-aye, and the chimpanzee. Verily, if the researches of science demonstrate that this was the method of creative action, we may not murmur.