r in wider and wider
combinations. Orderly procedure was found where there had seemed such
confusion as only capricious spirits could occasion. It is learned, too,
that even as the individual man has grown up from babyhood, so the race
of man has grown up from the beast. The globe itself has grown from a
simple origin into infinite diversity and complexity. There has been a
universal, orderly growth,--what we name "Evolution." And it is learned
that all mental phenomena, so far as we can explore them, stand in some
close relation to a physical basis in the brain, and to a train of
physical antecedents.

And now the men who have come up by the path of this knowledge stand face
to face with the men who have been climbing in the path whose signboards
are such as "Duty," "Worship," "Aspiration;" and the question arises, Do
our paths lie henceforth together, or do they separate, and is the one
party losing its travel?

Perhaps the best example of the union of the two pursuits in one man is
given by Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin worked out, through a very genuine, homely, and personal
experience, the conviction that _moral perfection_ is the only true aim.
He reached this conviction while still a young man, and in the main tenor
of his life he was faithful to it. He made no vaunt of his religion,
founded no sect, gave his words and deeds chiefly to practical affairs;
and perhaps few guessed, until at the close of his life he told his own
story with consummate charm, that the secret motive and mainspring of his
life had been the same that animates the saints and saviors,--the thirst
for moral perfection. The motive and method had been hidden, but the
result had long been clear to the eyes of the whole world. Franklin's
character was reverenced alike in the court of France and the farmhouses
of Pennsylvania and New England. To the Old World he seemed the heroic
and coming man of the New World, side by side with Washington. The
Virginian embodied the highest traditional virtues of the race,
self-mastery, patience, magnanimity, devotion to the common good; the
Pennsylvanian, if less called on for the heroic forms of antique virtue,
added to its substance new traits of wisdom, progress, and
happiness,--signs of a better age to be.

Moral perfection was Franklin's secret and ruling principle. But his
life was conspicuously engaged in the fields of science and of
statesmanship. He was a leader in exploring the mater