ural transition from the lifeless to the living may yet be within reach of human discovery? Still further. Are we content to believe that evolution began with the nebula? Are we satisfied to assume our chemical atoms as an ultimate and inexplicable fact? Herschel and Maxwell, indeed, have reasoned, from the supposed absolute likeness of atoms of any particular element, that they bear "the stamp of a manufactured article," and must therefore be supposed to have been specially created at some definite epoch of beginning. But, when we are speaking of things of which we know so little as we know of atoms, there is logically a boundless difference between saying that we know no difference between the atoms of hydrogen, and saying that we know there is no difference. Is it not legitimate for us to recognize here again the direction in which analogy points, and to ask whether those fundamental units of physical nature, the atoms themselves, may not be products of evolution? Thus analogy suggests to us the question, whether there is any beginning of the series of evolutionary changes which we see stretching backward into the remote past; whether the nebula from which systems have been evolved were not themselves evolved; whether existing forms of matter were not evolved from other forms that we know not; whether creative Power and creative Intelligence have not been eternally immanent in an eternal universe. I cannot help thinking that theology may fitly welcome such a suggestion, as relieving it from the incongruous notion of a benevolent Deity spending an eternity in solitude and idleness. The contemplation of his own attributes might seem a fitting employment for a Hindoo Brahm. It hardly fits the character of the Heavenly Father, of whom we are told that He " worketh hitherto." In the last suggestion I have ventured outside the realm of science. But most men are not so constituted that they can carry their scientific and their philosophical and religious beliefs in compartments separated by thought-proof bulkheads. Scientific Scientific and philosophic and religious thought, in the individual and in the race, must act and react upon each other. It was, therefore, inevitable that our century of scientific progress should disturb the religious beliefs of men, When conceptions of the cosmos with which religious beliefs had been associated were rudely shattered, it was inevitable that those religious beliefs themselves should seem to be imperiled. And so, in the early years of the century, it was said, "If the world is more than six thousand years old, the Bible is a fraud, and the Christian religion a dream." And later, it was said, "If physical and vital forces are correlated with each other, there is no soul, no distinction of right and wrong, and no immortality." And again it was said, “If species have originated by evolution, and not by special creation, there is no God." So it had been said centuries before," Ii the earth revolves around the sun, Christian faith must be abandoned as a superstition." But in the Nineteenth century, as in the Sixteenth, the scientific conclusions won their way to universal acceptance, and Christian faith survived. It showed a plasticity which enabled it to adapt itself to the changing environment. The magically inerrant Bible may be abandoned, and leave intact the faith. of the church in a divine revelation. The correlation of forces acting in the human cerebrum with those of inorganic nature may be freely admitted; and yet we may hold that there are other forms of causation in the universe. than physical energy, and that the inexpugnable belief of moral responsibility is more valid than the strongest induction. The "carpenter God" of the older natural theology may vanish from a universe, which we have come. to regard as a growth and not a building; but there remains the immanent Intelligence "Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, the God in whom " we live and move and have our being." The church has learned wisdom. The persecution of Galileo is not likely to be repeated, nor even the milder forms of persecution which assailed the geologists at the beginning, and the evolutionists in the middle, of our century. And science, too, has learned something. In all its wealth of discovery, it recognizes more clearly than ever before the fathomless abysses of the unknown and unknowable. It stands with unsandaled feet in the pres ence of mysteries that transcend human thought. Religion never so tolerant. Science never so reverent. Nearer than ever before seems the time when all souls that are loyal to truth and goodness shall find fellowship in freedom of faith and in service of love. THEODORE ROOSEVELT THE STRENUOUS LIFE [Address by Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-fifth President of the United States, Author, Statesman, former Governor of New York (1898-1900) born in New York city, October 27, 1858; delivered at the Appomatox Day Celebration of the Hamilton Club, at Chicago, Ill., April 10th, 1899. President Hope Reed Cody of the club occupied the chair. Mr. Roosevelt, then Governor of New York, was the central figure and chief speaker at the celebration.] GENTLEMEN:-In speaking to you, men of the greatest city of the West, men of the State which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant, men who preeminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American character, I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease but the doctrine of the strenuous life; the life of toil and effort; of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes not to the man who desires mere easy peace but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. A life of ignoble ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. I ask only that what every self-respecting American demands from himself, and from his sons, shall be demanded of the American nation as a whole. Who among you would teach your boys that ease, that peace is to be the first consideration in your eyes-to be the ultimate goal after which they strive? You men of Chicago have made this city great, you men of Illinois have done your share, and more than your share, in making America great, because you neither preach nor practice such a doctrine. You work yourselves, and you bring up your sons to work. If you are rich, and are worth your salt, you will teach your sons that though they may have leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used leisure merely means that those who possess it, being free from the necessity of working for their livelihood, are all the more bound to carry on some kind of non-remunerative work in science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in historical research-work of the type we most need in this country, the successful carrying out of which reflects most honor upon the nation. We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor; who is prompt to help a friend; but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail; but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present, merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past. A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose. If the freedom thus purchased is used aright, and the man still does actual work, though of a different kind, whether as a writer or a General, whether in the field of politics or in the field of exploration and adventure, he shows he deserves his good fortune. But if he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labor as a period not of preparation but of mere enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a cumberer on the earth's surface; and he surely unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do so should again arise. A mere life of ease is not in the end a satisfactory life, and above all it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world. As it is with the individual so it is with the nation. It is a base untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history. Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the gray twi |