So long as the processes of evolution were confined to the plant and brute there could be no revelation of anything but force; or at most there could be only dawnings of anything higher. The forms of life which won in the struggle and survived were manifestations of power--they hardly implied anything more. The tough spine and the strong jaw and the sharp claw were all that mattered. Everything that appeared was pushed into existence by a force from behind. There was no sign or hint of freedom, or of life formed under the sway of a vision or an ideal. Things moved “for a million aeons through the vast, waste dawn” toward a goal, but the goal was never in sight and it played no part in the process. John Fiske has, somewhere, denied the truth of the proverb that “nature abhors leaps,” and he has given a beautiful illustration from the cutting of a cone. If you pass a plane parallel to the base of a cone you cut a circle. If you tilt the plane slightly the curve becomes an ellipse. The ellipse grows more eccentric as the tilting increases and finally without any warning your plane cuts a parabola whose sides curve off into infinity and never touch ends again. Some such mighty leap appears in the process of evolution. Up to a certain point life evolved by forces working _a tergo_.[2] There is a slight tilt in the system and a being appears capable of selecting a goal for himself and of acting to attain it, a being who could live in some degree for a world as it ought to be.[3] This is what in America we call “the great divide”--the watershed which determines the streams of a continent. As soon as there was a being who could select ideals and live for conscious ends a new kind of evolution began. The other side of “the divide,” evolution had been physical,--body, and body function had been the goal. This side “the divide,” it was spiritual and social, and the goal was the evolution of the man within man. The things which mattered now were love, sacrifice, service, goodwill rather than “tooth and claw.” Before, nature’s goal had been along the line of least resistance. Now, the line of march set straight against instinct and along the line of greatest resistance. There could be advance on this side “the divide,” only as the ideal became clearer and its sway more coercive. Ever since man was man he has transcended the actual and lived by vision, which means, I think, that finite and infinite are not sundered and that we always partake of more than just ourselves. Beyond the edge of what we are there is always dawning a farther possibility--that which we ought to be--the _a fronte_ compulsion.[4] This is one of God’s ways of revealing Himself. It is a man’s chief glory--the glory of the imperfect.