on; (3) its practical
universality, at least as an inherited tendency; and (4) the unity of
the human race in such {229} sense that the same postulates may be made
with regard to all men, and the same capacity for moral redemption
(more or less) assumed to be in them. Now, as regards the first three
of these positions enough has been said already, and the last of them
does not appear to be at present in dispute between science and
religion. St. Paul says, 'God made of one' (or 'of one blood,' for
this reading is possibly right) 'every nation of men' (Acts xvii. 26).
And of one blood, if not of one individual, all men are, according to
the present conclusions of biological science. A recent work on
ethnology, by Mr. Keane (Cambridge Geographical Series), speaks
thus:--'The hominidae are not separately evolved in an absolute
sense--i.e. from so many different anthropoid precursors, but the
present primary divisions are separately evolved from so many different
pleistocene precursors, themselves evolved through a single pliocene
prototype from a single anthropoid precursor[12].'

It does not seem to me, then, that Christianity is really bound up with
anything more than the unity of the human race, which science also
strongly asserts. But to pass from these positions, which may be
regarded as certain, to something more conjectural (apart from any
question of the literary character of Genesis iii), we may argue thus:
Sin is a fact having the same character universally in human history,
though the sense of sin has varied greatly, reaching back as far as
human history extends. This would lead us to suppose that it goes back
to the roots of the race. It suggests some original {230} fall, some
tainting of the race in its origin. I do not see, then, anything
absurd or contrary to evidence in such a hypothesis as this.--The
Divine Spirit is assumed to be at work in all the development of the
world. The 'laws of nature' are but His methods. At a certain moment
a new thing had emerged in the universe hitherto inorganic. It was the
fact of life. It was new[13]. But it was in continuity with what had
gone before. This principle of life had its great development,
vegetable and animal. It had attained a form in certain anthropoid
apes such as we are familiar with in men. Suppose then that the Divine
Spirit breathes Himself, again in a new way, into one single pair or
group of these anthropoid animals. There is lodged in