Dean Stanley preached a fine sermon last Sunday before the
University of Oxford, on the duality of man's nature, and the unreasonableness of alarm at the scientific hypothesis of his evolution from a nature purely animal and earthly. He remarked that though the chronology of Genesis had long been given up, it was not possible to go much further to- -wards a true theory than the author of that book did when he 'called the first man Adam,' or than St. Paul did when, follow- ing Genesis, he said, "The first man was of the earth, earthy." "To deny development was against all analogy, and would make man, of all creatures, the most miserable." "The materialism of the lecture-room," like "that of the altar and the sacristy," confines its attention to the manipulation of man's physical nature ; while true wisdom endeavours to rise through that to his true spiritual life, the principle of his eternal progress. In short, it was the drift of the Dean of Westminster's sermon that'natural selection'
is the fit antecedent of ' moral ' and 'spiritual' selection,—the kind of the selecting agency itself rising concurrently with the type of the result. That is fine doctrine, and timely doctrine too.
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