CHAPTER XIII. SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. W yields up the HAT is evolution? To the modern man of science it key of all the varied physical It opens, notwithstanding the many phenomena of nature. pages torn from that book of stone which lies underneath our feet, but which is still eloquent with the strong purpose of its being, the door to avenues of thought and of discovery which were at one time sealed to man. It points with unerring finger to the sublime law, and the great object of the planet on which we live. That law is progress; that object the creation of man; and although the absolute proof of half-developed races of beings which have lived and died, and which once represented the highest form of life on our globe, is still required, the facts on which the evolutionist bases his belief gather so closely around it, that we infer their existence as we infer that of some ancient ocean when we find far inland the fragmentary remains of shells. The enormous changes through which our globe has passed, the continents formed and swept away, its periods of intense heat and ice-like cold, its fossil remains of every kind, and its primary rocks, which have no tale to tell save that there was a time when life existed not,— all point to the vast period which must have elapsed since it came into being from the fire-mist in space. Had that long period no purpose? Was one of those millions of years wasted, and without its end? R CHAPTER XIII. SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. WHAT is evolution? To the modern man of science it yields up the key of all the varied physical phenomena of nature. It opens, notwithstanding the many pages torn from that book of stone which lies underneath our feet, but which is still eloquent with the strong purpose of its being,—the door to avenues of thought and of discovery which were at one time sealed to man. It points with unerring finger to the sublime law, and the great object of the planet on which we live. That law is progress; that object the creation of man; and although the absolute proof of half-developed races of beings which have lived and died, and which once represented the highest form of life on our globe, is still required, the facts on which the evolutionist bases his belief gather closely around it, that we infer their existence as we inte that of some ancient ocean when we find far inland the fragmentary remains of shells. The enormous changes through which our g passed, the continents formed and swept away of intense heat e every kind, and No. Each hour witnessed change, and change in the direction of growth towards something higher, no matter what the cataclysm, the struggle of its birth. Scarred with fire and rent with earthquake, barren of life, even the life of some small lichen-stain upon its rocks, one who could have looked upon it then might have thought it a forsaken orb which never could become what we call a world. But each day saw its matter become more refined, each year saw its rocks slowly pulverised into fertile earth, its plains prepared, its steaming mists upraised in clouds and dispersed in showers, its trickling streams gathering into rivers, and its oceans retreating upon their sandy shores. The life for which those countless days and years had been a preparation at last stole slowly forth the moss appeared; the coarse blade of grass; the lowest forms of vegetation. The germs of life arose, fostered by sun, and wind, and rain, and everchanging conditions, from their basis of protoplasm, and the different environments of these primodial life-germs produced the variations in their organisation which bade some remain corals and mollusks, and some develop into higher forms. Age after age, upwards and onwards, grew and arose the ascending scale; there came the coal-fern of the swamps, the mighty palm, the graceful encrinite, the weird saurians, the huge pachyderms, and finally the more nobly organised elk and mammoth of a recent age. The flower, the singing bird, the grass-grown field, the clear sky, all rejoiced in the promise of the coming time. The cave-dwellers, earliest of our race, appeared at last, fished in the laughing waters of the river, hunted their game, invented their rude instruments of warfare and of industry in the age of Stone. What though they were woolly-haired, and thick-lipped, and ill-formed,— what though their customs were childish and savage,—their soul-life in subjection to their physical nature, and the long ancestry of countless forms of organised life? The era of the human race had dawned upon the earth, and with it the fulfilment of which those forms were silent prophecies. The first movements of monad and ascidian all had their part to play in producing mind. Life; sensation; intelligence; each had manifested itself through the organism and the kingdom fitted to give it birth. In man all these were represented, concentrated, developed, in order that he, "the heir of all the ages," should express something higher,—soul. The immense diversity of the vegetable kingdom, and of insect life; the lesser, but still great, diversity of the animal kingdom, all yielded in power and nobility to the being who exhibited unity of type and structure, who stood erect upon the earth, possessed of no weapon of defence, who had become subject to a new law, and whose strength lay in his brain. Such is evolution; the science of universal progress, which is now recognised by some minds, and which will ere long be recognised by all. And it is here that spiritualism uplifts the study of material science into a sublime plane. The materialist looks only on the past; he notes the testimony of the igneous rocks, the records of countless forms of life in higher and higher grades, which have perished for ever; he ponders on the drift-beds of the Somme, the caves of Aurignac and Liége, the traces of semi-human life to be found almost everywhere upon our globe; the ocean-steamer of to-day enables him to come face to face with the fastdying phenomenon of savage life which recoils from human civilisation; he beholds the rude effort, as it were, of the |