nterest which "Darwinism" has excited
in the minds and hearts of more persons than dare to confess their doubts
and hopes? It is because it restores "Nature" to its place as a true
divine manifestation. It is that it removes the traditional curse from
that helpless infant lying in its mother's arms. It is that it lifts
from the shoulders of man the responsibility for the fact of death. It
is that, if it is true, woman can no longer be taunted with having
brought down on herself the pangs which make her sex a martyrdom. If
development upward is the general law of the race; if we have grown by
natural evolution out of the cave-man, and even less human forms of life,
we have everything to hope from the future. That the question can be
discussed without offence shows that we are entering on a new era, a
Revival greater than that of Letters, the Revival of Humanity.

The prevalent view of "Nature" has been akin to that which long reigned
with reference to disease. This used to be considered as a distinct
entity apart from the processes of life, of which it is one of the
manifestations. It was a kind of demon to be attacked with things of
odious taste and smell; to be fumigated out of the system as the evil
spirit was driven from the bridal-chamber in the story of Tobit. The
Doctor of earlier days, even as I can remember him, used to exorcise the
demon of disease with recipes of odor as potent as that of the angel's
diabolifuge,--the smoke from a fish's heart and liver, duly burned,--"the
which smell when the evil spirit had smelled he fled into the uttermost
parts of Egypt." The very moment that disease passes into the category
of vital processes, and is recognized as an occurrence absolutely
necessary, inevitable, and as one may say, normal under certain given
conditions of constitution and circumstance, the medicine-man loses his
half-miraculous endowments. The mythical serpent is untwined from the
staff of Esculapius, which thenceforth becomes a useful walking-stick,
and does not pretend to be anything more.

Sin, like disease, is a vital process. It is a function, and not an
entity. It must be studied as a section of anthropology. No
preconceived idea must be allowed to interfere with our investigation of
the deranged spiritual function, any more than the old ideas of
demoniacal possession must be allowed to interfere with our study of
epilepsy. Spiritual pathology is a proper subject for direct observatio