in that sense there may be no moral progress; but of this there can be, I think, no reasonable doubt in the mind of any impartial student of history, that the thoughts of men have been surely, if slowly, widened as to liberty, chastity, justice, benevolence, piety--and that their feelings have been correspondingly modified, their manners refined, and their laws and institutions improved. There may be no such thing as the inheritance or transmission of virtue, and every step of moral advance may have to be gained by the free exertion of each individual, people, and generation in succession; but, as a matter of fact, our race does on the whole advance, and not recede, in the path towards good. Just as reason, although it may be feebler than the passions in a short struggle, can always conquer them if it get time to collect its energies--so virtue gains and vice loses advantages with the lapse of years; for, while the prejudices which opposed the former subside and its excellences become ever increasingly apparent, as history flows onward, those who leagued themselves in support of the latter quarrel among themselves, its fascinations decay, and its deformities become more manifest and repulsive. Age is linked to age, and in the struggle of good and evil which pervades all the ages, victory is seen slowly but steadily declaring itself for the good. The vices die--the virtues never die. Some great evils which once afflicted our race have passed away. What great good has ever been lost? Justice carries it over injustice in the end. Now, whatever be the means by which moral progress is brought about, the testimony which it involves as to the moral character of God is none the less certain. The successful application of Darwinian principles, for example, to the explanation of human progress, would be no disproof of design in social evolution. If a natural selection, based on force, were shown to have prepared the way for a natural selection based on craft, which in its turn gave place to justice, and that again to love, God must none the less be credited with having contemplated the final result, and that result must none the less be held to be an indication of His character. When what is called the struggle for existence has been proved to lead, not to the deterioration but to the improvement of life--to the greatest abundance of the highest kinds of life possible in the circumstances--it will have been vindicated and shown to have been a means to secure such ends as a wise and benevolent Being would entertain. When it has been proved to have constrained men gradually to recognise that the virtues are the conditions of the most desirable existence, and that the vices are so many obstacles to the attainment of such an existence, it will have been still further vindicated by having been thus shown to be the mode in which righteousness is realised in the world. It matters little, so far as the religious