Page:Education and Life; (IA educationlife00bakerich).pdf/238

 *rily the inference. An apple is none the less an apple because it is the product of an unbroken development from a germ and simple shoot. The spirit of self-sacrifice need be none the less valid because it is a late phase of some simple instinct. We believe the world was fashioned according to an intelligent plan, a plan gradually realized, and that its meaning is found, not in the lower, but in the higher stages of development. We explain the purpose of creation, not by the first struggle of a protozoan for food, but by the last aspiration of man for heaven.

"From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began:  From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in Man."

The latest science hesitates to question the validity of our higher emotional life. It is becoming antiquated to say that, because we are descended from animals, our sense of duty, our feelings of faith and reverence have no more significance than the animal instincts from which they may have developed. There they are in all their refinement, need, and suggestiveness, and, as such, are a proper ground of belief. A late philosophical evolutionist says it is useless to theorize about our impulse to pray, its use or futility—we pray because we cannot help praying. Evolution is undergoing the test of the last stage of a scientific process—in this instance that of fitness to explain the facts of man's nature. It may not escape the test by denying the facts.

Pardon the seeming digression, but the reasonableness of our faith is the ground of interest. Interest