As a matter of fact, we do retain our regard for ourselves in the full light of our blood-relationship with men of all sorts of evil traits, even brutish ones. Fox, tiger, serpent, viper, shark, blood-sucker, vulture--all these epithets--some of them actually biblical--have long been applied to members of our species. Within the consanguinity of the most convinced Fundamentalist there are thieves, murderers, ravishers, maniacs, and idiots. One whose self-respect remains intact in the presence of this truth is simply self-deceived if he imagines that his sense of human dignity would be affronted by admitting that the anthropoids are his distant cousins. No, each of us readily asserts his superiority to his relatives, so readily that the theory of evolution simply cannot have had the effect supposed. At the most, advantage has been taken of it to emphasize or reinforce notions that have their source elsewhere. In the case of the Fundamentalists, antagonism to the concept of evolution upon this ground is a cloak that is employed, more or less unconsciously, to cover some other reason for the opposition. The more one looks into the course of religious thought, and of popular thought in general, since Darwin, the more certain becomes this conclusion. Biologists and biological psychologists, as far as I am aware, never claimed to add a single item to the already recognized list of beast-like qualities in men, and theologians never attacked evolution upon any such ground. Rather, what the new view of us added was an explanation of “how we got that way,” and the explanation--mark this--constituted a partial excuse (not justification, but excuse) for much of our bad conduct. It actually lifted from us a part of the condemnation that was inherent in the theological view of special creation. It is a fact, moreover, that--whether logically or not--from the evolutionary view of the past men gathered confidence in their own capacity for progress. Today we are actually embarrassed by the too-easy identification of evolution with progress. Men’s self-esteem was too much enhanced and soothed. What is not less interesting from the theological point of view is that the previously current views of the nature and work of God were ennobled. Whether logically or not, men thought that they saw more meanings, or saw them more clearly, in the system of nature. “Star-dust, and star-pilgrimages,” to use Emerson’s phrase, were not just “there”; they were getting ready to be the home of living things; and the lower forms of life were regarded as pointers-forward to higher forms. Again to borrow from the Concord “prophet of the soul,” And the poor worm shall plot and plan What it will do when it is man.