ed the issue and secured it. Back of this march of life, behind
this developing and ascending order, out in the darkness, before the
light was created, there was the Mind that accounts for man. Thus the
last becomes the first, the man that ends the creative process sees
that a human God must have preceded the process.

This truth is one of the greater insights of the time. The continuity
of life, from the lowest forms to the highest, has received during the
last fifty years an unparalleled recognition. So, too, with the fact
of the steady ascent of life. Not indeed in a literal and yet in a
true way, the modern scientific conception is a wonderful parallel to
the sublime hymn with which the Bible opens. In the beginning was the
fire-mist. In that fire-mist began the process of development. It
became worlds, systems innumerable, a stellar universe, and within
this whole a solar order, an earth beating forward in preparation for
the advent of life. Life when it came flowed into countless forms.
From the shapeless mass it pushed on upward into successively higher
and finer structures, ever aspiring toward man. Ages preceded the
advent of man. There were upon the part of life ages of preparation,
ages of climbing. Before life rose the mountain of the Lord; it
must be scaled and its summit reached before man could put in
an appearance. But the hour for which the whole cosmos had been
travailing in pain could not be indefinitely delayed. In the fulness
of time, as the tree bursts into bloom, as the tide rolls to the
flood, as the light breaks in through the gates of morning, nature
came to her supreme expression in man. Man is not here on his own
strength. He is not in the bosom of things unaccounted for. He is the
child of nature; her last act, her highest product, the best that is
in her power to bring forth, the son in whose wondrous being her own
motherhood is to undergo total transformation.

That is the modern scientific conception; look for a moment at its
greatness. Man as final issue of nature must turn round and look
backward. He must look down the long line of life to the far-off first
beginning. He must pass beyond the earliest forms in which the vital
movement began to the mysterious, formless, eternal power behind all.
And it is here that nature is lifted into a new character by her human
product. In that eternal power there must be a reason to account
for man's reason, conscience to account for his conscience,