Nor does the purely Christian objection to the development hypothesis seem less, but even more insuperable than that derived from the province of natural theology. The belief which is perhaps of all others most fundamentally essential to the revealed scheme of salvation, is the belief that “God created man upright,” and that man, instead of proceeding onward and upward from this high and fair beginning, to a yet higher and fairer standing in the scale of creation, sank and became morally lost and degraded. And hence the necessity for that second dispensation of recovery and restoration which forms the entire burden of God’s revealed message to man. If, according to the development theory, the progress of the “first Adam” was an upward progress, the existence of the “second Adam”—that “happier man,” according to Milton, whose special work it is to “restore” and “regain the blissful seat” of the lapsed race—is simply a meaningless anomaly. Christianity, if the development theory be true, is exactly what some of the more extreme Moderate divines of the last age used to make it—an idle and unsightly excrescence on a code of morals that would be perfect were it away. I may be in error in taking this serious view of the matter; and, if so, would feel grateful to the man who could point out to me that special link in the chain of inference at which, with respect to the bearing of the theory on the two theologies—natural and revealed—the mistake has taken place. But if I be in error at all, it is an error into which I find not a few of the first men of the age,—represented, as a class, by our Professor Sedgwicks and Sir David Brewsters,—have also fallen; and until it be shown to _be_ an error, and that the development theory is in no degree incompatible with a belief in the immortality of the soul—in the responsibility of man to God as the final Judge—or in the Christian scheme of salvation—it is every honest man’s duty to protest against any _ex parte_ statement of the question, that would insidiously represent it as ethically an indifferent one, or as unimportant in its theologic bearing, save to “little religious sects and scientific coteries.” In an address on the fossil flora, made in September last by a gentleman of Edinburgh to the St. Andrew’s Horticultural Society, there occurs the following passage on this subject: “Life is governed by external conditions, and new conditions imply new races; but then as to their creation, that is the ‘_mystery of mysteries_.’ Are they created by an immediate fiat and direct act of the Almighty? or has He originally impressed life with an elasticity and adaptability, so that it shall take upon itself new forms and characters, according to the conditions to which it shall be subjected? Each opinion has had, and still has, its advocates and opponents; but the truth is, that _science_, so far as it knows, or rather so far as it has had the honesty and courage to