hateful feelings will be more and more sternly repressed by public
opinion, and such feelings will become weakened by disuse, while the
sympathetic feelings will increase in strength as the sphere for their
exercise is enlarged. And thus at length we see what human progress
means. It means throwing off the brute-inheritance,--gradually throwing
it off through ages of struggle that are by and by to make struggle
needless. Man is slowly passing from a primitive social state in which
he was little better than a brute, toward an ultimate social state in
which his character shall have become so transformed that nothing of the
brute can be detected in it. The ape and the tiger in human nature will
become extinct. Theology has had much to say about original sin. This
original sin is neither more nor less than the brute-inheritance which
every man carries with him, and the process of evolution is an advance
toward true salvation. Fresh value is thus added to human life. The
modern prophet, employing the methods of science, may again proclaim
that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Work ye, therefore, early and
late, to prepare its coming.




XV.

The Message of Christianity.


Now what is this message of the modern prophet but pure
Christianity?--not the mass of theological doctrine ingeniously piled up
by Justin Martyr and Tertullian and Clement and Athanasius and
Augustine, but the real and essential Christianity which came, fraught