n
improvement. This is what evolution does; for evolution is nothing new
in the world. It is only the name for the method of God, which is as
old as the universe itself, new to us because we have just discovered
it; but as old as the light of a star that has been travelling for
twenty-five thousand years, and has just come into the field of the
astronomer's telescope, so that he announces it as a new discovery..
This is what it means.

Now let me call your attention to the fact that in the world below us
the world of the trees and the shrubs and the flowers and the plants
this evolutionary force is working after precisely the same method that
I have just been indicating. All the fair, the beautiful things have
been developed under this process, in accordance with this method, out
of the first bare and rough and crude manifestations of vegetable life.
Nothing has been thrown away that was of any value. Take it, for
example, in regard to the wild weeds which have become the oats and the
wheat and the barley and the rye of the world. All the old that was of
value has been kept and has been developed into something higher and
finer and sweeter. The aboriginal crab-apple has become a thousand
luscious kinds of fruits; and the flowers all their beauty, all their
fragrance, all their color and form? are the result of the working of
this method of God's power that we have called evolution. Nothing of
any value is left behind in the uncounted ages of the past. All that is
of worth to-day has been transformed and lifted to some higher level
and made a part of the wondrous life that is all around us.

So, when you come to the animal life, you find the same thing. The
swift foot, the flashing wing, the beauty of color, all the wonders of
animal life have simply been developed in accordance with this method
and under this impelling force which we call evolution, which is only a
name for the working of God.

When we come up to the level of man, what do we find? Man as an animal
is not the equal of a good many of the other animals in the world. He
is not as swift as the deer, he is not as strong as the lion, he cannot
fly in the air like a bird, he cannot live in the sea like the fishes.
He is restricted to the comparatively contracted area of the surface of
the land. He is not as perfect as an animal; but what has evolution
done? It has given him power of conquest over all these, because the
evolutionary force has left the bodily