put water to warm on the camp-fire in a calabash or gourd with wet clay smeared over the bottom to keep it from burning. Wherever the clay thus employed was fine enough to form a mold and bake hard in shape, it would cling to the gourd, and be used time and again in the same way without renewal, till at last it came to be regarded almost as a component part of the compound vessel. Traces of this stage in the evolution of pottery still exist in various outlying corners of the world. Savages have been noted who smear their dishes with clay; and bowls may be found in various museums which still contain more or less intact the relics of the natural object on which they were modeled. In one case the thing imbedded in the clay bowl is a human skull, presumably an enemy's.

In most cases, however, the inner gourd or calabash, in proportion as it was well coated up to the very top with a good protective layer of clay, would tend to get burned out by the heat of the fire in the course of time; until at last the idea would arise that the natural form was nothing more than a mere mold or model, and that the earthenware dish which grew up around it was the substantive vessel. As soon as this stage of pot-making was arrived at, the process of firing would become deliberate, instead of accidental, and the vessel would only be considered complete as soon as it had been subjected to a great heat which would effectually burn out the gourd or calabash imbedded in the center. But the close similarity of early fictile forms all the world over, and their obvious likeness to the same simple, natural types, combine to show us that the art of pottery had everywhere the same easy origin, and that it was everywhere based on the same primitive unmanufactured vessels.

Three main forms of pottery, and later of glass-ware, may be safely held to take their origin from the bottle-gourd alone. The first is the double or treble-bulbed vase, so common a type in Japanese and Oriental pottery. This is the most distinctively gourd-like of all, and it has given rise indirectly to endless variations. The second is the flat, circular vase with two lateral handles-the diota-always showing in early specimens its gourd origin by the nature of its ornamentation, which radiates (as is well exhibited by some of my Morocco specimens) from the umbilicus or calyx-scar in the center of the fruit. The third is the clay water-bottle or carafe, with round bulb below and tall neck above, which gives rise in turn to the vast majority of modern vases, vessels, and bottles. Even the common beer-bottle, with the "kink" or "kirck" at the bottom, affiliates itself ultimately upon this last-named form, being derived in the last resort from those long-necked gourds which could stand firmly on their own basis, owing to a slight re-entrant depression about the umbilicus. The bowl or basin, on the other

hand, owes its shape rather to the gourd or calabash cut in two transversely, and used as an open receptacle for liquids and powders. Of such bowls I have one or two excellent savage specimens. To this type may at last be traced, I believe, the tea-cup, the coffee-cup, the mug, and perhaps also the tumbler.

I may add that, in simple and early types of pottery, the ornamentation is always based on the natural forms suggested by the first or other primitive model. The decorations were first copied, I believe, from the ornamentation carved or worked on the natural form, except where they arose from the marks of thongs or other suspenders used in the firing. Now, in the gourd we have, so to speak, three natural elements of ornamentation to which all decorative adjuncts, if any, must necessarily adapt themselves: First, there is the stalk cut off to form the mouth in my first and third types, but retained as a central scar or knob, the main focus of the whole, in the second or diotic form so common in Corsica; secondly, there is what I have ventured here to call the umbilicus -the mark left by the faded calyx and corolla in the center of the fruit, retained as a central point of the vessel in all three forms; and, thirdly, there are the lines in the grain of the gourd which radiate like meridians from either pole, running from the stemscar right round the equator to the umbilicus. Whoever tries to decorate a real gourd, either by carving or painting, will find himself practically compelled to fall in with the natural lines thus inevitably laid down for him; he must obey the laws of his prime material. All gourds actually decorated, however rudely, in simple and naïve societies are so adorned. Hence, in the first and third forms, the decoration runs up and down the sides of the bottle, or in transverse bars and longitudinal lines; while in the second or flat, circular vase type it runs always in concentric rings round a point in the middle.

Now, this pretty Kabyle ware, which formed the original text for my present sermon, is pottery of a very antique and naïve type-the last relic, in fact, of ancient Phoenician art. The Phonicians brought these ideas with them to Carthage, and the Crathaginians diffused them among the aboriginal mountaineers of the Atlas range, whose lineal descendants are the Kabyles of the Djurjura in our own day. That simple ware, with its yellow groundwork and its dichromatic ornamentation in russet-brown and black (the one ochre, the other peroxide of manganese), has been manufactured ever since in the uplands of the Atlas by the Moslemized grandsons of the Christianized Mauritanians. In tone and color it recalls somewhat the earliest Greek and Etruscan vases: but the law of Islam, of course, prevents the introduction of human or animal figures, so the ornamentation now consists entirely of geometrical and arabesque designs, accommodated to

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the necessary natural lines of their gourd originals. Each village has its own distinctive patterns. I have a small collection of native Kabyle and Morocco pottery, and in every piece without exception one can see at once the particular sort of gourd-double, single, or flat-faced-on which each individual vase must be finally affiliated. And, when once one has learned to know and recognize these central types, the character of the ornamentation on more advanced keramic products of other nations often enables one to guess correctly from what original natural form the particular piece in question is ultimately descended. I believe it would be possible so to arrange all the keramic products in a great museum, along a series of divergent radial lines from certain fixed centers, that the common origin of all from each special sort of gourd or calabash would become immediately obvious to the most casual observer.

DARWINISM AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH.

III.

WE come now to that which most people feel to be the real

difficulty in the way of accepting Darwinism. No well-instructed churchman supposes that the faith of Christ stands or falls with the theory of special creations, or that the existence of God is less certain because we have learned that the witness of conscience is necessary to interpret the witness of Nature, and that physical science by itself can tell us less than we thought about the personality and the love of God.

4. But Darwinism means a great deal more than the substitution of derivation for special creation, or of the new teleology for the old argument from design. It means a new view of man, and his place in creation. Darwin foresaw this from the first, and in the "Origin of Species" asserted his belief that "much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."* Now, if this had only meant a chemical analysis of "the dust of the ground" out of which man was formed, if, like Matthew Henry, Darwin had assured us―on grounds for which, indeed, no evidence is given that the dust was "not gold dust, powder of pearl, diamond dust, but common dust: dust of the ground"; "not dry dust, but dust wetted with the mist which went up from the earth," it is clear religion would have felt that it had lost as little as science would have gained. But Darwin's theory connected man with the higher vertebrata by analogies as strong as these which made other species descendants from a common stock. This was the secret of the opposition to the "Origin of Species.”

* P. 428.

It was not so much what was stated, as the obvious implications of the doctrine, which men shrank from. Darwin, who had nothing of the defiant arrogance of some who speak in his name, was even accused of dishonesty in not clearly stating at the outset the bearing of the doctrine on man. And his volume on "The Descent of Man" was his answer to the charge. But his letters show how fully he realized the consequences of his theory from the first:

I am deeply convinced [he wrote to Lyell, while revising the proof-sheets of the "Origin"] that it is absolutely necessary to go the whole vast length, or stick to the creation of each separate species.* . . . I can see no possible means of drawing the line and saying, Here you must stop.t . . . I believe man is in the same predicament with other animals. It is, in fact, impossible to doubt it.‡

#

For the scientific acceptance of the theory, as Darwin says, "ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte," but for people generally, who judge a theory by its consequences, not on its evidence, it is, as he says of Carpenter, "the last mouthful that chokes." || Of course, as he admits, it is open to every one to believe that man appeared by a separate miracle, but to hold the doctrine of special creation here and here only is to ignore the arguments which, ex hypothesi. carried conviction everywhere else.

It was on this point that Darwin and Wallace parted company, though the divergence is commonly represented as far greater than it was. Wallace admitted the evolution of man out of a lower form, but contends, and this was what he calls his "heresy," that natural selection would have only given man a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas it is greatly superior. He therefore contrasts "man" with the "unaided productions" of Nature, and argues that, as in artificial selection, man supervenes and uses the law of natural selection to produce a desired result, so "a higher intelligence" may have supervened, and used the law of natural selection to produce man. Whether from the scientific side this is rightly called a "heresy" or not it is not necessary to decide; but certainly, from the religious side, it has a strangely unorthodox look. If, as a Christian believes, the "higher intelligence" who used these laws for the creation of man was the same God who worked in and by these same laws in creating the lower forms of life, Mr. Wallace's distinction, as a distinction of cause, disappears; and if it was not the same God, we contradict the first article of the Creed. Whatever be the line which Christianity draws between man and the rest of the visible creation, it certainly does not claim man as the work of God, and leave the rest to "unaided Nature."

We have then to face the question, If it be true that man, "as

"Life and Letters," i, p. 519.

ti, p. 526.

* [It is only the first step that costs.] ii, p. 30.

ii, p. 35.

‡ii, p. 59. A ii, p. 58.

far as his corporeal frame is concerned,"* is created, as other species were, by evolution from lower forms; if he was not, as we have been accustomed to think, an independent creation, but related through his whole bodily structure with "the beasts that perish "; if he was not an absolutely new departure, but the last term in a progressive series-how does this new view affect our Christian faith?

We might have been ready to answer, It no more touches the Christian view of human nature than a scientific proof, if it had been possible, that our blessed Lord was very man would affect the truth of his divinity. And the analogy is a very close one. It is not heresy to assert that Christ is "Av@pwmos, but that he is Vòs avoрwжоs, man and nothing more. Similarly, say what we ψιλὸς ἄνθρωπος, will of the affinities of man's physical nature, it is only when we deny that he is anything more that we really degrade him. As Bacon somewhere puts it

They that deny a God destroy man's nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is an ignoble creature.

Unfortunately, Christian apologists have missed an important distinction. They have not seen that their controversy with a Darwinian agnostic is a controversy with his agnosticism, not with his Darwinism; with his limitation of all knowledge to the facts of sense, not with any doctrine he may scientifically prove as to the interrelations of the facts observed.

We are constantly told that Darwinism is degrading, that it is unworthy of the dignity of man, that it is a "gospel of dirt." If such a charge had come from a representative of those nations which held the descent of man from gods or demigods, it would have been intelligible enough, but it sounds strange in the mouth of those who believe that "the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground." Indeed, what in Darwinism is called a "gospel of dirt," appears in the Bible as a "gospel of grace." We naturally, as Kingsley says, seek

To set up some "dignity of human nature," some innate superiority to the aniinals, on which we may pride ourselves as our own possession, and not return thanks with fear and trembling for it as the special gift of Almighty God.+

But the inspired writers "revel in self-depreciation" that they may the more exalt the love and condescension of God. The moral, as distinct from the scientific, teaching of the Bible can not be mistaken in this matter. Man made in the image of God, inbreathed with the breath of life, is formed of the dust of the ground. God's method is always to choose "the base things of the world and things which are despised," and use them for his * Darwin, ii, p. 140. "Prose Idylls," p. 22.