But it may be judged that I am trespassing on a field into which I have no right to enter. Save, however, for its close proximity with that in which the geologist expatiates as properly his own, this little volume would never have been written. It is the fact that man must believingly coöperate with God in the work of preparation for the final dynasty, or exist throughout its never-ending cycles as a lost and degraded creature, that alone renders the development hypothesis formidable. But inculcating that the elevatory process is one of the natural law, not of moral endeavor,—by teaching, inferentially at least, that in the better state of things which is coming there is to be an identity of race with that of the existing dynasty, but no identity of individual consciousness,—that, on the contrary, the life after death which we are to inherit is to be merely a horrid life of wriggling impurities, originated in the putrefactive mucus,—and that thus the men who now live possess no real stake in the kingdom of the future,—it is its direct tendency, so far as its influence extends, to render the required coöperation with God an impossibility. For that coöperation cannot exist without belief as its basis. The hypothesis involves a misreading of the geologic record, which not merely affects its meaning in relation to the mind, and thus, in a question of science, substitutes error for truth, but which also threatens to affect the record itself, in relation to the destiny of every individual perverted and led astray. It threatens to write down among the degraded and the lost, men who, under the influence of an unshaken faith, might have risen at the dawn of the terminal period, to enjoy the fulness of eternity among the glorified and the good. FOOTNOTES [1] Mr. Miller is the author also of _Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland_, one vol. 8vo.; _A Letter from one of the Scotch people to the Right Honorable Lord Brougham and Vaux, on the opinions expressed by his Lordship in the Auchterarder Case_; and _The Whiggism of the Old School, as exemplified in the Past History and Present Position of the Church of Scotland_. The second of these works is well characterized by Mr. Gladstone as “an able, elegant, and masculine production.” [2] London, 1847, pp. 409