There were at one time no flowering plants. The time came at last for their appearance. Which is the higher, grander mode of producing them, immediate creation of every flowering species, or development of the flower out of the green leaves of some old club moss or similar form? The latter seems to me at least by far the higher mode. And to have created a ground-pine which could give rise to a rose seems far more difficult and greater than to have created both separately. It requires more genius, so to speak. It gives us a far higher opinion of the ground-pine; does it disgrace the rose? We can look dispassionately at plants. The rose is still and always a rose, and the oak an oak, whatever its origin. And I believe that we shall all readily admit that evolution is here a theory which does the highest honor to the wisdom and power of the Creator. What if the animal kingdom is continually blossoming in ever higher forms? Does not the same reasoning hold true, only with added force? I firmly believe that we should all unhesitatingly answer, yes, could we but be assured that all men would everywhere and always believe that we, men, were the results of an immediate creative act. But why do we so strenuously object to the application to ourselves of the theory of evolution? One or two reasons are easily seen. We have all of us a great deal of innate snobbery, we would rather have been born great than to have won greatness by the most heroic struggle. But is man any less a man for having arisen from something lower, and being in a fair way to become something higher? Certainly not, unless I am less a man for having once been a baby. It is only when I am unusually cross and irritable that I object to being reminded of my infancy. But a young child does not like to be reminded of it. He is afraid that some one will take him for a baby still. And the snob is always desperately afraid that some one will fail to notice what a high-born gentleman he is. Now man can relapse into something lower than a brute; the only genuine brute is a degenerate man. And we all recognize the strength of tendencies urging us downward. Is not this the often unrecognized kern of our eagerness for some mark or stamp that shall prove to all that we are no apes, but men? It is not the pure gold that needs the "guinea stamp." If we are men, and as we become men, we shall cease to fear the theory of evolution. Now this is not the only, or perhaps the greatest, objection which men feel or speak against the theory. But I must believe that it has more weight with us than we are willing to admit. But some say that the theory of immediate creation and immutability of species is the more natural and has always been accepted, while the theory of evolution is new and very likely to be as short-lived as many another theory which has for a time fascinated men only to be forgotten or ridiculed.