deep of His Spirit, a development of moral power which shall make the vision of a future life to be shared with Him no longer a mere dream-beyond the conception of an ordinary man. Socrates in his noble allegory of the cave represents men as prisoned here, watching only the shadows of the real things pass before them. We are prisoners of the senses; it is the senses which hide from us that which is real. As Blanco White puts it in his sonnet, we are blinded by appearances:

'Mysterious night! When our first parent knew

Thee from report divine, and heard thy name,

Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,

This glorious canopy of light and blue?

Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew,

Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,

Hesperus with the host of heaven came,

And, lo! creation widened in man's view.

Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find,
Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed,

That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind?
Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife?
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?'

It is in the hope that some of the thoughts which I have put before you may help to the rending of the veil of sense, by showing how things within our knowledge suggest developments at present only impossible because invisible to the eye uneducated,

that I have presented to you these thoughts on evolution. Science, so far as it limits itself to the discovery of facts, can never contradict God's revelation of Himself in other ways. It may compel us in the future, as it has done in the past, to alter our reading of the meaning of those other revelations. But science exploring the secrets of creation is as true an exponent of God's dealings as theology when it limits itself to one source of revelation. In the Memoirs of Caroline Fox we are told that at the meeting of the British Association at York, the date of a coin was under discussion: at last the coin, relieved of an incrustation of dirt, showed the letters D.G. So,' said the president, does any advance in science reveal to us the glory of God.'

IX

CHRIST IN THE REALM OF SOCIOLOGY

OUR grandfathers held slaves, and thought it no wrong. Our fathers before them were lords or serfs ; they thought it right that some should command, and no wrong that others should yield up their property, their wills, and their lives.

In our own days the relation between men and men has gone on changing. Employers are no longer justified if they buy labour in the cheapest market. Men are not content with big wages if other men are starving. The principle of leaving every one to himself is giving place to the principle of State interference, and change rapidly succeeds change.

What is the force which drives on these changes? Why did men cease to fight as animals, form a society, and say to one man, 'Be thou our king'? Why did they split up the functions of the king, and make some judges and some teachers? Why did they

rebel against the king and cancel his powers? Why did they make laws for themselves, and why are they for ever making new laws?

That all these changes come about in the struggle for existence' is no adequate answer either to the first question or to the last. It does not explain why the standard of existence has risen; why men who once struggled for means of living now struggle for means of thought and of being.

The answer is incomplete, unless it be added that men have been driven from change to change because they have always been conscious of an ideal manhood, and of a call to make that manhood their own. They have seen in the heaven of their imagination the form of a truer man, and have heard a voice saying, This is your life.'

The men

The first man, it has been said, was the animal who became conscious of sin; conscious, that is, of having missed a call to a higher life. who fought over the roots of the earth were haunted not only by the fear of death but by a longing for a life of order, and so they chose a king and formed a settled society. The men who owned a king next rebelled, not only because they feared his tyranny but because they dreamed of a life which is peace. The men who make laws and change laws are led

M

on by the belief that men may be just, righteous, temperate, and generous.

The force, or part of the force, which drives men from change to change is the thought of an ideal manhood—the knowledge of a standard of life higher than their own-a belief in the humanity of that power which is shaping their ends, rough-hew them as they may. They dimly feel after a truer manhood, and that it is God's will it should be theirs.

Men have thus age by age pushed upwards, trying by all means to grasp the vision-praying, sacrificing, fighting, and law-making, if only they might live more as they were called to live.

Two or three examples will illustrate my meaning. The slave-owners of the eighteenth century were more human than the feudal lords of the thirteenth century. They built schools for the poor, founded hospitals, and saved the lives which the feudal lords would have wasted. But they went on buying and selling their negro slaves till slowly a higher standard of life loomed on the horizon. They saw that as long as they kept slaves they must be below that standard, that true men could not profit in the oppression of brother men, and that a slaveowner was degraded by the sufferings and degradation of his slaves. They, therefore, at great cost freed