As a

arrested types, perversions, and the many manifestations which humanly created gods have never explained, whether done in the name of religion or science. result of this, evolution took its rightful place in the world. The most important question asked by Professor Zahm is being asked by every man, woman and child every day, and for this reason we will consider it briefly while our conclusions about evolution are fresh in memory. "Are there special interventions on the part of a Supreme Being in the government of the universe, and are we to look for frequent, if not constant, exhibitions of the miraculous in the natural world?" According to the theory of the Origin of Mental Species, there are such interventions, they are constant, and they are miraculous to the felt-out and thought-out minds. But they are conditional. They are conditional on mental purification, or, putting it in another light, they are the result of freeing the mind from phenomena. When evolution had cleared away much of the mass of illusions through which man had been previously compelled to contemplate creation, he was ready to receive the revelation that evolution was not an intelligent force, and what was more important was the fact of his receiving the revelation which proved his method of scientific deduction to be correct. Had his work been imperfect he would have made a god of evolution, and, like all makers of gods, he and his followers would have devoted all future efforts to attributing everything to that god. And here is uncovered the great difficulty with the study of creation. Men have almost invariably devoted their time to prove the truth of some pre-conceived or pretaught theory. They have grasped at every phase of

phenomena that seemed to in any manner justify it and ignored everything that seemed to suggest its human origin.

The helpful feature in the theory of the Origin of Mental Species is its analytical process. By this the Divine is separated from the material and human entirely. According to this theory God is Immaterial Intelligence Mind. God is the Father of ideas in the Immaterial mind and he is the Father of nothing else. He is the Universe of Intelligence, Principle, the Cosmos, the “Definite Order with which nothing interferes." According to this, prophecy consists in revealing to human consciousness the Divine laws of this Absolute Intelligence. Moreover, this Absolute Intelligence enables man to read the past in the geological tables of stone and foretell the ultimate lunar existence of the earth. It enables men to analyze matter, make deductions, reason, and construct in a few years a talking machine, when it took the felt-out mind millions of years to evolve the same thing. God is Intelligence. The application of intelligence is a form of prayer. I repeat: The Greek philosophers chased the symbols of logic until they found a soulless logic. The scientist has chased the symbols of matter until he has found a soulless science and the philosopher has chased the symbolized gods until he has found a godless universe. Had these men turned and analyzed the power which made them iconoclasts and enabled them to destroy the gods of human imagination, they would have found God. If God is Mind and the Father of Mind, He will never be found in anything else. The Westminster confession of faith declared Him aright and then stopped. "God is a most pure Spirit, invisible

without body, parts or passions." Had these eminent theologians analyzed words instead of exhausting themselves battling with attributes of the flesh, they would have found the Power that gives us power over all flesh. Lost in a maze of unscientific mystical concepts and attempting to explain phenomena from a standpoint of reason, they have long since lost even their apparently reasonable hypothesis until discussion on this subject has become a mere war of meaningless words.

The theory of the Origin of Mental Species explains evolution in the organic world as felt-out and thoughtout activities. They seem, in some manner, to counterfeit the ideas of the Absolute as the material machine counterfeits the machine in the inventor's mind. Neither the inventor's mind nor the idea is in the machine, but it represents both and the machine could not exist without them. A steel bridge is sustained by the principle of the bridge and not by the mass of steel. The steel was of no use until we got the idea. Therefore matter only expresses to the senses and makes available to the senses what a full knowledge of principle would enable us to do. If man could dematerialize his concept of weight and realize only the principle he, in the Absolute sense, could walk on the principle and have no need of the bridge. All science is a miracle to those unacquainted with science. When we are scientists in the Absolute sense, there will be no miracles or unexplained phenomena. The miracles of the Bible are the result of revealed science and the miracles of the industrial world are the result of inspired science. They are one and the same thing with this difference: In one instance it has

1 Westminster Confession of Faith.

come to man by intensifying the senses, in the other he has seen it direct without the intervening senses. In one instance he calls it science and in the other he calls it God. Had men like Darwin known how close they were to this law of adjustment, they would not have been burdened all through life with a diseased body. It is pitiful when we read that Darwin was not even able to go to affairs held in his honor on account of physical incapacity; which physical incapacity caused him intense suffering. Had he turned his marvelous intuition to determining the origin of his intelligence, he would have found something which would have made him a healthy

man.

The principal difficulty in realizing the Absolute, which realization enables us to see the world of principle and distinguish the material from the spiritual, is the necessity of developing the Absolute sense. The human brain realizes sensation or vibration and the human eye sees objects consisting of like elements, but as the Absolute law has neither sensation nor vibration we must prepare ourselves to receive it. Having referred to this before and explained how this may be done, I will merely mention it here as a reminder. This comes, as I have explained before, as a result of a process of eliminating the symbol and seeing in principle the thought symbolized. The persistent application of this results in revelation. While explanations and knowledge of the process help, everyone must do this for himself. Lecturing to a class about mathematics or mechanics would never make either a mathematician or a mechanic. If we do not get results, we do not know anything, no matter how Iwell we believe we know it.

There are those who demand obvious demonstrations, but you cannot make an obvious demonstration of something which is never obvious. Moreover, if you make a demonstration of the effect of truth on the obvious, it has no more meaning to the observer than legerdemain. We cannot make a demonstration of the Nebular Hypothesis for we have neither the time nor the material. We can though watch the cooling of iron in the ladle and see the resemblance to its formations of those made on a larger scale by nature. We can see the creek deposit the different kinds and colors of sands which will in time become stone. We can study erosion, denudation and accumulation until the whole resolves itself into a process to which we give a name. Nature does not explain nature, for nature cannot reason. Whence then, we ask, comes this power to reason?

We

We have explained how we believe a condition results in what has been termed spontaneous generation. took for illustration the isolated volcanic island of Oahu in the Pacific Ocean. We might be asked to make a laboratory demonstration of this. It would be just as reasonable to ask us to make a demonstration of evolution. We have neither the time nor the material for so doing. In fact, we do not know what the materials are and if we did, we have not yet isolated them, but we some day will.

With regard to the possibility of such a demonstration, Professor Zahm says: "Should then, such a discovery be made as it is possible and conceivable, I do not say probable-should some more fortunate investigator some day detect in the laboratory of nature the