man's occupying the largest and most central spot in the universe is no longer felt. It is recognized as a primitive and childish notion. With our larger knowledge we see that these vast and fiery suns are after all but the Titan like _servants_ of the little planets which they bear with them in their flight through the abysses of space. Out from the awful gaseous turmoil of the central mass dart those ceaseless waves of gentle radiance that, when caught upon the surface of whirling worlds like ours, bring forth the endlessly varied forms and the endlessly complex movements that make up what we can see of life. And as when God revealed himself to his ancient prophet He came not in the earthquake or the tempest but in a voice that was still and small, so that divine spark the Soul, as it takes up its brief abode in this realm of fleeting phenomena, chooses not the central sun where elemental forces forever blaze and clash, but selects an outlying terrestrial nook where seeds may germinate in silence, and where through slow fruition the mysterious forms of organic life may come to take shape and thrive. He who thus looks a little deeper into the secrets of nature than his forefathers of the sixteenth century may well smile at the quaint conceit that man cannot be the object of God's care unless he occupies an immovable position in the centre of the stellar universe. II. Man's Place in Nature, as affected by Darwinism. When the Copernican astronomy was finally established through the discoveries of Kepler and Newton, it might well have been pronounced the greatest scientific achievement of the human mind; but it was still more than that. It was the greatest revolution that had ever been effected in Man's views of his relations to the universe in which he lives, and of which he is--at least during the present life--a part. During the nineteenth century, however, a still greater revolution has been effected. Not only has Lyell enlarged our mental horizon in time as much as Newton enlarged it in space, but it appears that throughout these vast stretches of time and space with which we have been made acquainted there are sundry well-marked changes going on. Certain definite paths of development are being pursued; and around us on every side we behold worlds, organisms, and societies in divers stages of progress or decline. Still more, as we examine the records of past life upon our globe, and study the mutual relations of the living things that still remain, it appears that the higher forms of life--including Man himself--are the modified descendants of lower forms. Zooelogically speaking, Man can no longer be regarded as a creature apart by himself. We cannot erect an order on purpose to contain him, as Cuvier tried to do; we cannot even make a separate family for him. Man is not only a vertebrate, a mammal, and a primate, but he belongs, as a genus, to the catarrhine family of apes. And just as lions, leopards, and