ich all comes.

"So roll things to the level which you love,
That you could stand at ease there and survey
The universal Nothing undisgraced
By pert obtrusion of some old church-spire
I' the distance! "[A]

[Footnote A: _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_.]

Some writers on ethics and religion have adopted the same view of the
goal of the idea of evolution. In consistency with this supposed
tendency of science, to resolve all things into their simplest, and
earliest forms, religion has been traced back to the superstition and
ghost-worship of savages; and then it has been contended that it is, in
essence, nothing more than superstition and ghost-worship. And, in like
manner, morality, with its categorical imperative of duty, has been
traced back, without a break, to the ignorant fear of the vengeance of a
savage chief. A similar process in the same direction reduces the love
divine, of which our poet speaks, into brute lust; somewhat sublimated,
it is true, in its highest forms, but not fundamentally changed.

"Philosophers deduce you chastity
Or shame, from just the fact that at the first
Whoso embraced a woman in the field,
Threw club down and forewent his brains beside;
So, stood a ready victim in the reach
Of any brother-savage, club in hand.
Hence saw the use of going out of sight
In wood or cave to prosecute his loves."[B]

[Footnote B: _Bishop Blouhram's Apology_.]

And when the sacred things of life are treated in this manner--when
moral conduct is showed to be evolved by a continuous process from
"conduct in general," the conduct of an "infusorium or a cephalopod," or
even of wind-mills or water-wheels, it is not surprising if the
authority of the moral law seems to be undermined, and that "devout
souls" are apprehensive of the results of science. "Does law so analyzed
coerce you much?" asks Browning.

The derivation of spiritual from natural laws thus appears to be fatal
to the former; and religious teachers naturally think that it is
necessary for their cause to snap the links of the chain of evolution,
and, like Professor Drummond, to establish absolute gaps, not only
between the inorganic and the organic worlds, but also between the
self-conscious life of man and the mysterious, spiritual life of Christ,
or God. But it seems to me that, in their antagonism to evolution,
religious teachers are showing the same incapacity to distinguish
between their friends and their foes, whi