The sovereignty of man does not depend on a particular view of the exact manner in which the Creator caused the elements of the earth to produce his frame. ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground;’ it is not _how_ He so formed him. None has power to affirm or to deny how, unless with reverent hands he find it written in the rocks, or woven indelibly with the very structure of man himself. It is because men have interpreted, without evidence, the stages of creative action, and welded these non-essentials with iron girdles of dogma, that faith has again and again been imperilled. The true crown of manhood, the final majesty and exalted mystery of creative power, was not man’s _body_, but his soul. ‘And breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul,’ is the expression of that which gives his unshared dignity to man. What is meant by this, who shall explain? Who can peer into the depths of a mystery so profound? It defies all our powers of search; dare we make a special interpretation or understanding of how this was brought about, an essential of belief? Is it not enough that it was the supreme, as it was, so far as our present knowledge will carry us, the final outcome of creation? When the Creative Power and wisdom had built man’s physical nature of the dust of the ground, whether suddenly or slowly, by this method or by that, He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul. It was the possession of what we call the soul that gave to the manhood its being. How this was imparted, who can know? who shall explain? Even if the very _method_ be at last discovered, or approximated, the unalterable question must remain, _why_ the method, the law, brought about so sublime a result, and from whence came the conditions that made the laws direct themselves to such an exalted end. In fine, how physical laws could so be caused to act as to give origin to consciousness, thought, and moral faculties. Plainly, this ‘end’ must have lain in the Divine ‘beginning;’ and we must go behind and below the mechanics of phenomena and explain their _vera causa_; we must find our way above matter not-living in the great past, and fathom the very essence of the cause that made it live, before we can attempt to explain the origin of that self in man which looks upon and _knows itself_. We have seen that matter and force will not, as sole factors, lend themselves to a philosophy of the origin and explanation of this. A linear arrangement of the ascending mentality of brutes does not really explain, or even minimize, the difficulties of the problem. It simply makes the area of the problem the wider.