Vegetation itself became more
complicated, and as it approached perfection lost its gigantic growth.
Solidarity, compactness in all things, became the order of nature; the
atmosphere surrounding the earth, became more and more fitted for
the higher and more complicated animal organizations. At last when
time was ripe for his advent, when the earth was fitted for his
residence, and the air for his breathing, MAN, the last and most
perfect in his structure, the most delicate and finished in his
organization of all living things, made his appearance. He stepped
from the hand of God, the only thinking, reflecting, the only
intellectual, responsible being, in all the world. He stood at the
head of created matter, with all things on the earth subject to his
will, and corresponding to his, condition, his attributes, his
necessities, and his instincts.
"Thus this great earth itself, has been but one continued illustration
of the great theory and principle of progress. From a beginning, lost
in the thick darkness of a past eternity, it has been marching forward
in a career as pause-less as the sun in his journeyings through the
sky, as clearly demonstrable as the growth of the germ that starts
from the buried acorn, and moves on to its full development in the
great oak. Science records with unerring certainty the progress of the
earth, and of animal life, from the lowest existences in the mollusca
and polypi, up to the superlatively complicated, and delicate
structure of man, tracing it step by step, until it is finished in the
noblest work of God, a human body coupled with an immortal soul!
"And here arises a question which science has not solved, and to which
the philosophy, the wisdom, the logic of the past can give no answer.
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