Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

406 CONCLUSIONS.

garden-age of the Tertiary; in the midst of the most favorable conditions for increasing the vigor of life and expanding it into new forms. It showed its influence by developing mammalian life in one direction into the monstrous forms of the mammoth and the mastodon, the climax of animal growth ; and in the other direction into the more marvelous expansion of mentality found in man.

There are two things necessary to a comprehension of that which lies around us—deyelopment and design, evolution and purpose ; God’s way and God’s intent. Neither alone will solve the problem, These are the two limbs of the right angle which meet at the first life-cell found on earth, and lead out until we find man at one extremity and God at the other.

Why should the religious world shrink from the theory of evolution? To know the path by which God has advanced is not to disparage God.

Could all this orderly nature have grown up out of chance, out of the accidental concatenation of atoms? As Bacon said :

“I would rather believe all the fables in the Talmud and the Koran than that this universal frame is without a mind 1”

Wonderful thought! <A flash of light through the darkness.

And what greater guarantee of the future can we haye than evolution? If God has led life from the rudest beginnings, whose fossils are engraved, (blurred and obscured,) on the many pages of the vast geological yolume, up to this intellectual, charitable, merciful, powerful world of to-day, who can doubt that the same hand will guide our posterity to even higher levels of deyelopment ?