t and its inexorable law;
that the animals who inhabited it preyed upon and devoured each other as
at present, their claws and teeth being specially adapted for that
purpose. Even their half-digested remains have been preserved in fossil.

'Death,' wrote a Pagan philosopher, in sharp contrast to the teaching of
the Church, 'is a law and not a punishment,' and geology has fully
justified his assertion.

Then came decisive evidence showing that for many thousands of years
before his supposed origin man had lived and died upon our globe--a
being, as far as can be judged from the remains that have been
preserved, not superior but greatly inferior to ourselves, whose almost
only art was the manufacture of rude instruments for killing, who
appears in structure and in life to have approximated closely to the
lowest existing forms of savage life.

Then came the Darwinian theory maintaining that the whole history of the
living world is a history of slow and continuous evolution, chiefly by
means of incessant strife, from lower to higher forms; that man himself
had in this way gradually emerged from the humblest forms of the animal
world; that most of the moral deflections which were attributed to the
apple in Eden are the remains and traditions of the earlier and lower
stages of his existence. The theory of continuous ascent from a lower to
a higher stage took the place of the theory of the Fall as the
explanation of human history. It is a doctrine which is certainly not
without hope for the human race. It gives no explanation of the ultimate
origin of things, and it is in no degree inconsistent with the belief
either in a Divine and Creative origin or in a settled and Providential
plan. But it is as far as possible removed from the conception of human
history and human nature which Christendom during eighteen centuries
accepted as fundamental truth.

With these things have come influences of another kind. Comparative
Mythology has accumulated a vast amount of evidence, showing how myths
and miracles are the natural product of certain stages of human
history, of certain primitive misconceptions of the course of nature;
how legends essentially of the same kind, though with some varieties of
detail, have sprung up in many different quarters, and how they have
migrated and interacted on each other. Biblical criticism has at the
same time decomposed and analysed the Jewish writings, assigning to them
dates and degrees of authori