Finally, the evolutionist picture wants some of the fairest lineaments of humanity, and cheats us with a semblance of man without the reality. Shave and paint your ape as you may, clothe him and set him up upon his feet, still he fails greatly of the "human form divine;" and so it is with him morally and spiritually as well. We have seen that he wants the instinct of immortality, the love of God, the mental and spiritual power of exercising dominion over the earth. The very agency by which he is evolved is of itself subversive of all these higher properties. The struggle for existence is essentially selfish, and therefore degrading. Even in the lower animals, it is a false assumption that its tendency is to elevate; for animals when driven to the utmost verge of struggle for life, become depauperated and degraded. The dog which spends its life in snarling contention with its fellow-curs for insufficient food, will not be a noble specimen of its race. God does not so treat His creatures. There is far more truth to nature in the doctrine which represents him as listening to the young ravens when they cry for food. But as applied to man, the theory of the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest, though the most popular phase of evolutionism at present, is nothing less then the basest and most horrible of superstitions. It makes man not merely carnal, but devilish. It takes his lowest appetites and propensities, and makes them his God and creator. His higher sentiments and aspirations, his self-denying philanthropy, his enthusiasm for the good and true, all the struggles and sufferings of heroes and martyrs, not to speak of that self-sacrifice which is the foundation of Christianity, are in the view of the evolutionist mere loss and waste, failure in the struggle of life. What does he give us in exchange? An endless pedigree of bestial ancestors, without one gleam of high or holy tradition to enliven the procession; and for the future, the prospect that the poor mass of protoplasm which constitutes the sum of our being, and which is the sole gain of an indefinite struggle in the past, must soon be resolved again into inferior animals or dead matter. That men of thought and culture should advocate such a philosophy, argues either a strange mental hallucination, or that the higher spiritual nature has been wholly quenched within them. It is one of the saddest of many sad spectacles that our age presents. Still these men deserve credit for their bold pursuit of truth, or what seems to them to be truth; and they are, after all, nobler sinners then those who would practically lower us to the level of beasts by their negation even of intellectual life, or who would reduce us to apes, by making us the mere performers of rites and ceremonies, as a substitute for religion, or who would advise us to hand over reason and conscience to the despotic authority of fallible men dressed in strange garbs, and called by sacred names. The