shells upon the shore, no aimless looking back; but work with stout
heart and resolute will. It all means work, overmastering habits of
thought and action, lifting the soul from the grooves of heredity, and
in all ways making aspiration attract the inspiration that sustains the
soul.




EVOLUTION.

All subjects pertaining to our knowledge of the soul are too subtle to
be weighed and proved by external intellect alone. Our lives are ruled
by such a hotch-potch of inherited beliefs and tendencies, that it is
almost impossible for us to use any discrimination concerning them; or
to arraign ourselves before the tribunal of our own better judgment in
such manner as to enable us to separate the false and effete ethical
and religious influences, from the wise and true, which alone are
abiding and permanent.

Thus we grope and stumble along through our earthly lives, burdened
with ideas which were set in motion far back in a crude age, and which
were so well adapted to their time that they still vibrate to the
tendencies of our own day. This applies to every department of human
experience, and were it not that we are, as a huge family, better than
our cherished beliefs, higher in the scale of development than these
would seem to indicate, we should still be under the dominion of the
so-called "Dark Ages." The most important and the dearest phase of
human experience must come, of course, through its religious beliefs,
and as they are narrow and superstitious, on the one hand, or grand