ism.

What is the secret of the profound interest 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