stance, light and air to the inorganic or organic, in producing the beginnings and determining the faculties and functions of the organic. Not that natural selection is not a vast law in determining organic life, but that in the beginnings the medium amid which things are and in which they come to be and change is a more prominent law.

It is thought by some, as the Boston Lectureship, that evolution taken with intuition is safe and only safe and that may or may not be wholly true. We remember that it was at first held to be fatal to the idea of a Creator to admit that man's body did not begin by a separate act of creation. Now, it is not considered at all dangerous to faith, to concede its product from antecedent animal life under evolution, It may be found as compatible with the safety of faith in the soul and in God, to assume the production of mental and moral faculties by acquisition and by influence or causes of the medium in which the human mind arose. Such would be none the less of Divine origin. The present general conviction among theologians, however, is, that the hypothesis of the so-called natural origin of our general ideas is fatal to faith in man and God the certain wreck of religion.

We are not affining that this may not be true, but are intentionally raising the question, however, of a possible mistake just here. A change in our conception of God's time and method in creating and endowing the primal human soul and in increasing the scope of its endowment, may in no wise militate against the maintenance of the soul's spiritual character and higher destiny, just as the change so many have made in their conception of God's method in producing the body of the primal man, in no wise destroys their faith that the human race has its origin in the creative power and wisdom of God.

A sufficiently strong case is already made out on this side to cause a present hesitancy in the opposition. The confident attitude and affirmations of Mr. John Fiske, are sufficiently formidable to at least command respectful examination. He declares that "the process of evolution is itself the working

out of a mighty teleology of which our finite understandings can fathom but the scantiest rudiments" and that "this dramatic tendency in the succession of events is the objective aspect of that which when regarded on its subjective side, we call Purpose. Such a theory of things," he avers, "is Theism. It recognizes an Omnipresent Energy, which is none other than the living God."

This language brings Mr. Fiske, it appears to us, into almost complete harmony with Lotze as to essential process and results.2

Though we have studied Lotze with care, so far as his works have come under our eyes, we ask your attention to a summary of his philosophy as to the points now before us by the more competent hand of James Sully. He says:

"The mechanical view of the world, as wrought out by modern science, is fully recognized and yet surmounted in the cosmological doctrine put forth by Herman Lotze in his Mikrokosmus. Lotze defends the mechanical method as applicable to all departments of phenomena, and insists on this way of viewing organic processes. At the same time he holds that the mechanical interpretation of nature is limited at every point. On the one hand Lotze accepts the teachings of modern speculation respecting the evolution of the solar system, the genesis of the organic out of the inorganic, the continuity of man with the lower animal world; and his exposition and defence of this idea of evolution as the result of mechanical laws is extremely able and interesting. Again, Lotze seeks to bridge over the gulf between material and spiritual evolution by bringing human development into close relation to the processes of nature as a whole. Yet, while thus doing justice to the mechanical conception of the gradual genesis of the world, Lotze strenuously affirms the limitations of this

Since this pater was written, we have read with care ex-President Porter's review of Evolution in The Independent of June 3. Incidentally he refers to Lotze, but says that he is far from being "a thorough going evolutionist." This language of Dr. Porter is misleading unless you understand clearly what Dr. Porter means by "a thorough-going evolutionist." It would appear that to Dr. Porter he only is a thorough-going evolutionist who discards from his idea of force all conceptions of spirituality and rules out of the domain of mechanism which he claims is everywhere operative all ideas of there being the Spirit of the Living Cause in the wheels If Dr. Porter means this, then certainly Lotze is not a thorough-going evolutionist, nor is John Fiske, or Herbert Spencer, if we may take their word for it, each indignantly denying the charge of materialism.

kind of explanation. He maintains that the mechanical processes themselves cannot be understood except by help of ideas respecting the real internal nature of the elements concerned. This nature he describes as life. In this internal activity Lotze finds a teleological element, viz.: a striving towards self-preservation and development. This idea he seeks to blend with that of mechanical relations among the elements, so as to make the whole upward process of physical evolution, the product of purposeful impulses. In addition to this, Lotze looks at the world-process as a gradual untolding of a creative spiritual principle, which he sometimes figuratively describes as the world-soul, more commonly, however, as the infinite substance." (Ency. Brit.)

We have thought this rapid survey (with some passing observations) of the positions of Lotze and of some prominent evolutionists, an important, nay, an essential preparation to ask you to look with us now into the alleged scientific perdition of the Boston Lectureship.

Since Mr. Cook accepts evolution as held by Lotze, and pronounces him safe, and since we have found Lotze as thoroughgoing an evolutionist as to the genesis of the world as is Speneer and Fiske, and since Mr. Cook claims by universal laws to set forth the certainty of a perdition of permanent bad character, it becomes us to inquire after the universal laws of evo lution and ethics.

1. It will not be disputed among Christians that the focal point of ethical ideas is benevolence - though we do not forget that rectitude is by some made the focal point. The controversies over this, as in the case between Dr. Mark Hopkins and Dr. McCosh, seem to conclude in each side admitting substantially all the other has to say; one, however, making rectitude the under side of benevolence, the other making benevolence the under side of rectitude.

2. If benevolence the service of others. be the central principle and law of ethics, the ethical government of God is a universal manifestation of this principle. The moral law is a unit it is one on earth and in all worlds. Its purpose can not change. Like its unity, its purpose is one throughout the moral universe. It is ever operative where are moral beings.

Its utility and scope are not therefore confined to earth. The moral law is a universal requisition of obedience of conformity to right. It is this in all worlds, as gravitation is in all the spheres.

Mr. Cook as stoutly insists on the universality of the laws of ethics as we do- being as he says one on earth and in the unseen Holy of Holies. We shall further on indicate the radical miscalculation he makes as to some of the circumstances of its presence both here and hereafter.

3. The laws laid down as universal by the evolution philosophers are substantially as follows: "The instability of the homogeneous, and the multiplication of effects by incident forces." These two universal laws apply to the phenomena of mind not less than to those of physical nature. "Every active force produces more than one change every cause produces more than one effect." These are universal laws, and by them the change from the homogeneous or simple to the heterogeneous or complex is brought about. "The instability of the homogeneous," says Spencer," is a universal principle. In all cases the homogeneous tends to pass into the heterogeneous, and the less heterogeneous into the more heterogeneous."

What we desire now to make clear is, that science in the hands of philosophers of both the schools of Spencer and Fiske, and Martineau and Lotze, gives no data of fact or law for the support of Mr. Cook's perdition. Lotze especially is so thorough a scientist in understanding on the one hand, and a philosopher with an efficient cause which is the Highest Good on the other, that the whole pressure of his interpretation of the universe is adverse to a "perdition which is a permanent subjection to guilt and sin and their consequences."

It should be borne in mind that the Boston Lectureship claims to prove the existence of this perdition by universal laws which he asserts he employs scientifically.

Lotze's philosophy of the phenomena of either mind or nature everywhere keeps articulating the laws of influence, change, perpetual relations, and in and through all the cease

less presence and activity of the Supreme Reality - the Highest Good.

Mr. Cook's science, ethical and otherwise, starts with the Bible's and husbandman's familiar truth, that a man reaps what he sows. He then hastens on to the generalization of the method, that the self propagating power of habit is the path to Heaven and Hell — and reaches the conclusion, that a prolonged refusal on earth to open the door to God, scientifically leads to a certainty that a point may be reached at death, and by many is reached, of permanent subjection to sin and its consequences.

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Thus we have sin enthroned in the fortress of habit, permanently secure against all the assaults of Omnipotence.

Recall now the two laws of evolution- laws alike of the phenomena of finite mind and physical nature: the instability of the homogeneous, and the multiplication of effects by incident forces.

To us, Mr. Cook's perdition appears none other than a homogeneous, or at most, a very moderately complex state of soul or mind. It is stability of mind and being, and admits of no influence to change from within or without. It can have no variety, no differentiation, no retrogression, no disintegration. Evolution has ceased, self-propagation has ended in an abrupt halt. The law of from less to more has exhausted itself; the soul no longer sows, its harvests are alone those from past sowing; it cannot in even evil" have more abundantly," for the limits of the farm have been reached, and the fertility of all the soil exhausted. Mr. Cook's perdition thus seems to us to forbid the idea of continued sinning, and, so, of a continued piling up of additional guilt and consequent suffering. His hell is a stable homogeneity of spirit. As a sea, its waves are fixed; as a fire its flames have no increase; as a country, it is an endless dead level; as suffering, it is one in quality and form; no variety of experience is possible or imaginable.

It may be said that, in as much as Mr. Cook uses the same language in speaking of the way to Heaven and to Perdition,