Look over the globe and see what a gulf separates man from all other
creatures. All the other animals seem akin--as if the product of the
same workman. Man, in contrast, seems like an introduction from some
other sphere or the outcome of quite other psychological laws; his
dominion over them all is so complete and universal. Without their
specialization of structure or powers, he yet masters them all and
uses them; without their powers of speed, he yet outstrips them;
without their strength of tusk and limb, he yet subdues them;
without their inerrant instinct, he yet outwits them; without their
keenness of eye, ear, and nose, he yet wins in the chase; without
their special adaptation to environment, he survives when they
perish. A man is marked off from the animals below him, I say, as if
he were a being of another sphere. He looks into their eyes and they
into his, and no recognition passes; and yet we have to believe that
he and they are fruit of the same biologic tree and that their stem
forms unite in the same trunk somewhere in the abyss of biologic
time.
The rise of man from the lower orders taxes our powers of belief and
our faith in the divinity that lurks underfoot far more than did the
special creation myth. Creation by omnipotent fiat seems easy when
you have the omnipotent being to begin with, but creation through
evolution is a kind of cosmic or biologic legerdemain that baffles
and bewilders us. It so far transcends all our earthly knowledge and
experience and all the flights of our philosophy that we stand
speechless before it. It opens a gulf that the imagination cannot
clear; it opens vistas from which we instinctively shrink; it opens
up abysms of time in which our whole historic period would be but a
day; it opens up a world of struggle, delay, waste, failure that
palls the imagination. It challenges our faith in the immanency and
in the ceaseless activity of God in his world; it brings the
creative energy down from its celestial abode and clothes it with
the flesh and blood of animal life. It may chill and shock us; it
shows us that we are of the earth earthy; yea, that we are of the
animal beastly; it presses us down in matter; it puts out the lights
to which we have so long turned as lighting our origin; the words
"sacred," "divine," "holy," and "celestial," as applied to our
origin and development, we have no longer any use for, nor for any
words or ideas that set us apart from the rest of creation--above it
in our origin or apart from it in our relations. The atmosphere of
mystery and miracle and sanctity that our religious training has
thrown around our introduction upon this planet and around our
relations and destiny science dispels. Our language and many of our
ideas and habits of thought date back to pre-scientific times--when
there were two worlds, the heavenly and the earthly, separated by a
gulf. Now we know that the two worlds are one, that they are
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