there is an ascension from the lower to the higher. The first duty of
our self-comprehending Adam will be to look backward. He will look
across the wide field whose farther limit lies in cloud and whose
hither border touches his feet. He will survey the creative process
that has led up to and that has come to its climax in him. And as he
thinks of himself as the product of nature, must he not conclude that
as reason is the result, reason must have preceded the process and
governed it? Humanity is the issue; therefore humanity must have
planned the issue and secured it. Back of this march of life, behind
this developing and ascending order, out in the darkness, before the
light was created, there was the Mind that accounts for man. Thus the
last becomes the first, the man that ends the creative process sees
that a human God must have preceded the process.

This truth is one of the greater insights of the time. The continuity
of life, from the lowest forms to the highest, has received during the
last fifty years an unparalleled recognition. So, too, with the fact
of the steady ascent of life. Not indeed in a literal and yet in a
true way, the modern scientific conception is a wonderful parallel to
the sublime hymn with which the Bible opens. In the beginning was the
fire-mist. In that fire-mist began the process of development. It
became worlds, systems innumerable, a stellar universe, and within
this whole a solar order, an earth beating forward in preparation for
the advent of life. Life when it came flowed into countless forms.
From the shapeless mass it pushed on upward into successively higher
and finer structures, ever aspiring toward man. Ages preceded the
advent of man. There were upon the part of life ages of preparation,
ages of climbing. Before life rose the mountain of the Lord; it
must be scaled and its summit reached before man could put in
an appearance. But the hour for which the whole cosmos had been