way.  And who are our antagonists?  Look within yourself and you will always find at least a pair ready to take a hand against you, to say nothing of the possibilities of environment.  “Rex regis rebellis.”  Our partner is trying by every method, except perhaps by “talking across the board,” to teach us the laws and methods of this great game.  And calls and signals are always allowable.  The game is not finished in one hand; he gives us a second and third, and repeats the signals, and never misleads.  Only when we carelessly or obstinately refuse to learn, and wilfully lose the game beyond all hope, does he leave us to meet our losses as best we may.

Let us carry the illustration a step farther.  Who knows that the game was, or could be, at first taught without talking across the board?  I can find nothing in science to compel such a belief, many things render it improbable.  Grant a personality in environment to which personality in man is to conform and gain likeness.  Environment can act on the digestive and muscular systems through mere material.  But how can personality in environment act on personality in man except by personal contact or by symbols easy of comprehension according to its own laws?  Some method of attaining acquaintance at least we should certainly expect.

But some of you may ask, How can any theory of evolution guarantee that anything of the present shall survive in the future?  It is continually changing and destroying former types.  The old order of everything changes and passes away, giving place to the new.  But is this the whole truth?  Evolution is a radical process, but we must never forget that it is also, and at the same time, exceedingly conservative.  The cell was the first invention of the animal kingdom, and all higher animals are and must be cellular in structure.  Our tissues were formed ages on ages ago; they have all persisted.  Most of our organs are as old as worms.  All these are very old, older than the mountains, and yet I cannot doubt that they must last as long as man exists.  Indeed, while Nature is wonderfully inventive of new structures, her conservatism in holding on to old ones is still more remarkable.  In the ascending line of development she tries an experiment once exceedingly thorough, and then the question is solved for all time.  For she always takes time enough to try the experiment exhaustively.  It took ages to find how to build a spinal column or brain, but when the experiment was finished she had reason to be, and was, satisfied.  And if this is true of bodily organs we should expect that the same law would hold good when the animal development gradually passes over into the spiritual.  And what is human history but the record of moral and religious experiments, and their success or failure according as the experimenters conformed to the laws of the spiritual forces with which they had to do?