STRUGGLE AND SUFFERING.—Children should realise the bleak and unprotected state through which their remote ancestors must have begun a human existence, the great dangers which they had to overcome, the contests with beasts and with the severities of climate, the hardships and perils and straits through which they passed; and should be grateful to those unknown pioneers of the human race, to whose struggles and suffering and discoveries and energies our present favoured mode of existence on the planet is due. The more people realise the effort that has preceded them and made them possible, the more are they likely to endeavour to be worthy of it: the more pitiful also will they feel when they see individuals failing in the struggle upward and falling back towards a brute condition; and the more hopeful they will ultimately become for the brilliant future of a race which from such lowly and unpromising beginnings has produced the material vehicle necessary for those great men who flourished in the recent epoch which we speak of as antiquity; and has been so guided, since then, as to develop the magnificence of a Newton and a Shakespeare even on this island in the northern seas. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ II THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONSCIENCE _Q. 2.  What, then, may be meant by the Fall of man?_ _A._ At a certain stage of development man became conscious of a difference between right and wrong, so that thereafter, when his actions fell below a normal standard of conduct, he felt ashamed and sinful. He thus lost his animal innocency, and entered on a long period of human effort and failure; nevertheless, the consciousness of degradation marked a rise in the scale of existence. * * * * * CLAUSE II This clause has been inserted because of the historic, though often mistaken, notions accreted round a legend of Fall and of a Paradise lost; and it is of interest to detect the germ of truth which these ancient ideas contain. It may be regarded as really an appendage of, or introductory to, the next clause.