So as we look back over the marvellous life-history of our planet, even from the dull time when there was no life more exalted than that of conferva scum on the surface of a pool, through ages innumerable until the present time when Man is learning how to decipher Nature's secrets, we look back over an infinitely slow series of minute adjustments, gradually and laboriously increasing the points of contact between the inner Life and the World environing. Step by step in the upward advance toward Humanity the environment has enlarged. The world of the fresh-water alga was its tiny pool during its brief term of existence; the world of civilized man comprehends the stellar universe during countless æons of time. Every stage of enlargement has had reference to actual existences outside. The eye was developed in response to the outward existence of radiant light, the ear in response to the outward existence of acoustic vibrations, the mother's love came in response to the infant's needs, fidelity and honour were slowly developed as the nascent social life required them; everywhere the internal adjustment has been brought about so as to harmonize with some actually existing external fact. Such has been Nature's method, such is the deepest law of life that science has been able to detect. Now there was a critical moment in the history of our planet, when love was beginning to play a part hitherto unknown, when notions of right and wrong were germinating in the nascent Human Soul, when the family was coming into existence, when social ties were beginning to be knit, when winged words first took their flight through the air. It was the moment when the process of evolution was being shifted to a higher plane, when civilization was to be superadded to organic evolution, when the last and highest of creatures was coming upon the scene, when the dramatic purpose of creation was approaching fulfilment. At that critical moment we see the nascent Human Soul vaguely reaching forth toward something akin to itself not in the realm of fleeting phenomena but in the Eternal Presence beyond. An internal adjustment of ideas was achieved in correspondence with an Unseen World. That the ideas were very crude and childlike, that they were put together with all manner of grotesqueness, is what might be expected. The cardinal fact is that the crude childlike mind was groping to put itself into relation with an ethical world not visible to the senses. And one aspect of this fact, not to be lightly passed over, is the fact that Religion, thus ushered upon the scene coeval with the birth of Humanity, has played such a dominant part in the subsequent evolution of human society that what history would be without it is quite beyond imagination. As to the dimensions of this cardinal fact there can thus be no question. None can deny that it is the largest and most ubiquitous fact connected with the existence of mankind upon the earth.