travailing in pain could not be indefinitely delayed. In the fulness
of time, as the tree bursts into bloom, as the tide rolls to the
flood, as the light breaks in through the gates of morning, nature
came to her supreme expression in man. Man is not here on his own
strength. He is not in the bosom of things unaccounted for. He is the
child of nature; her last act, her highest product, the best that is
in her power to bring forth, the son in whose wondrous being her own
motherhood is to undergo total transformation.

That is the modern scientific conception; look for a moment at its
greatness. Man as final issue of nature must turn round and look
backward. He must look down the long line of life to the far-off first
beginning. He must pass beyond the earliest forms in which the vital
movement began to the mysterious, formless, eternal power behind all.
And it is here that nature is lifted into a new character by her human
product. In that eternal power there must be a reason to account
for man's reason, conscience to account for his conscience, love to
account for his love, spirit to explain his spirit. Nature as mother
must become spirit to account for the soul of her son. The flower
shows what was in the seed, the oak is the revelation of what was in
the heart of the acorn; and man as the last and best outcome of nature
is the authoritative expression of the power that is behind nature.
Thus the mind that is the final product of nature discovers the mind
that is the source of nature. Man seeking the origin of his being
finds it on the farther side of nature in One like unto a son of man.
He learns later to distinguish between the reality and the image,
between God and godlike man. And then a wireless telegraphy is
established between them across the vast untraveled distances of
nature. The life near to God can not send the tokens of His inmost
character upward to man; the brute life near to man can not carry