minds to-day. Just think how we have in the present century
arrived where we can see the bearings of one set of facts in nature
as collated with another set of facts, and contrast it with the
view which even the greatest of those scientific French
materialists could take. Consider how fragmentary and how lacking
in arrangement was the universe they saw compared with the universe
we can see to-day, and it is not strange that to them it could be
an atheistic world. That hostility between science and religion
continued as long as religion was linked hand in hand with the
ancient doctrine of special creation. But now that the religious
world has unmoored itself, now that it is beginning to see the
truth and beauty of natural science and to look with friendship
upon conceptions of evolution, I suspect that this temporary
antagonism, which we have fallen into a careless way of regarding
as an everlasting antagonism, will come to an end perhaps quicker
than we realize.

There is one point that is of great interest in this connection,
although I can only hint at it. Among the things that happened in
that dim past when man was coming into existence was the increase
of his powers of manipulation; and that was a factor of immense
importance. Anaxagoras, it is said, wrote a treatise in which he
maintained that the human race would never have become human if it
had not been for the hand. I do not know that there was so very
much exaggeration about that. It was certainly of great
significance that the particular race of mammals whose intelligence
increased far enough to make it worth while for natural selection
to work upon intelligence alone was the race which had developed
hands and could manipulate things. It was a wonderful era in the
history of creation when that creature could take a club and use it
for a hammer, or could pry up a stone with a stake, thus adding one
more lever to the levers that made up his arm. From that day to
this, the career of man has been that of a person who has operated
upon his environment in a different way from any animal before him.
An era of similar importance came probably somewhat later, when man
learned how to build a fire and cook his food; thus initiating that
course of culinary development of which we have seen the climax in
our dainty dinner this evening. Here was another means of acting
upon the environment. Here was the beginning of the working of
endless physical and chemic