shadowed. The analogy is so perfect that we might almost be tempted to believe that the story is a prophetic allegory, did not nature itself witness its historic truthfulness. The fertile plain contained, embedded in its own soil, the elements of its own destruction. There is reason to believe that this is true of this world on which we live. A few years ago an unusually brilliant star was observed in a certain quarter of the heavens. At first it was thought to be a newly discovered sun; more careful examination resulted in a different hypothesis. Its evanescent character indicated combustion. Its brilliancy was marked for a few hours — a few nights at most-then it faded, and was gone. Astronomers believe that it was a burning world. Our own earth is a globe of living fire. Only a thin crust intervenes between us and this fearful interior. Ever and anon, in the rumbling earthquake, or the sublime volcano, it gives us warning of its presence. These are themselves gospel messengers. They say if we would but hear them "Prepare to meet thy God." The intimations of Science confirm those of Revelation: "The heavens and the earth . . . are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the Day of Judgment and perdition of ungodly men." What was true of Sodom and Gomorrah what was true of the earth we live on is true of the human soul. It contains within itself the instruments of its own punishment. There is a fearful significance in the words of the Apostle: "After thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up to thyself wrath against the day of wrath." Men gather, with their own hands, the fuel to feed the flame that is not quenched; they nurture in their own bosoms the worm that dieth not. In habits formed never to be broken; in words spoken, incapable of recall; in deeds committed, never to be forgotten; in a life wasted and cast away that can never be made to bloom again, man prepares for himself his own deserved and inevitable chastisement. "Son, remember!"-to the soul who has spent its all in riotous living, there can be no more awful condemnation.

THE JESUITS.

(From "Dictionary of Religious Knowledge.")

JESUITS is the popular name of a society more properly entitled "The Society of Jesus" of all the Religious Orders of the Roman Catholic Church the most important. The Society

of Jesus was founded in 1554 by Ignatius Loyola. He was a Spanish cavalier; was wounded in battle; was by his wounds, which impaired the use of one of his legs, deprived of his military ambition, and during his long confinement found employment and relief in reading a Life of Christ, and Lives of the Saints. This enkindled a new ambition for a life of religious glory and religious conquest. He threw himself, with all the ardor of his old devotion, into his new life; carried his military spirit of austerity and self-devotion into his religious career; exchanged his rich dress for a beggar's rags; lived upon alms; practised austerities which weakened his iron frame, but not his military spirit; and thus he prepared his mind for those diseased fancies which characterized this period of his extraordi

nary career.

He possessed none of the intellectual requirements which seemed necessary for the new leadership which he proposed to himself. The age despised learning, and left it to the priests; and this Spanish cavalier, at the age of thirty-three, could do little more than read and write. He commenced at once, with enthusiasm, the acquisition of those elements of knowledge which are ordinarily acquired long before that age. He entered the lowest class of the College of Barcelona, where he was persecuted and derided by the rich ecclesiastics, to whose luxury his self-denial was a perpetual reproach. He fled at last from their machinations to Paris, where he continued his studies under more favorable auspices. Prominent among his associates here was Francis Xavier, a brilliant scholar, who at first shrunk from the ill-educated soldier; yet gradually learned to admire his intense enthusiasm, and then to yield allegiance to it and its possessor. Several other Spaniards were drawn around the ascetic. At length, in 1534, Loyola and five associates, in a subterranean chapel in Paris, pledged themselves to a religious life, and with solemn rites made sacred their mutual pledges to each other and to God.

This was the beginning of the Order of the Jesuits. The original design was a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and a mission for the conversion of Infidels. But as all access to the Holy Land was precluded by a war with the Turks, Loyola and his associates soon turned their thoughts to a more comprehensive organization, specially designed to meet those exigencies which the Reformation had brought upon the Church.

Loyola introduced into the new Order of which he was the

founder the principle of absolute obedience which he had acquired in his military career. The name given to its chief was the military title of "General." The organization was not perfected so as to receive the sanction of the Pope until 1541. Its motto was Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam "To the greater Glory of God." Its vows embraced not only the obligations of Chastity, Poverty, and Obedience, but also a pledge on the part of every member to go as missionary to any country which the Pope might designate. Loyola was himself the first General of the new Order. Its Constitution, due to him, is practically that of an Absolute Monarchy. The General is elected by a General Congregation, selected for the purpose by the whole body of professed members of the various Provinces. He holds his office for life. A Council of Assistants aid him, but he is not bound by their vote. He may not alter the Constitution of the Society; and he is subject to deposition in certain contingencies; but no instance of the deposition of a General has ever occurred. Practically his will is absolute law, from which there is no appeal.

The Jesuits are not distinguished by any particular dress or peculiar practices. They are permitted to mingle with the world, and to conform to its habits, if necessary for the attainment of their ends. Their widest influence has been exhibited in political circles, where, as laymen, they have attained the highest political positions without exciting any suspicion of their connection with the Society of Jesus; and in education. they have been employed as teachers, in which position they have exercised an incalculable influence over the Church. . . . It should be added that the enemies of the Order allege that, in addition to the public and avowed Constitution of the Society, there is a secret code, called Monita Secreta - "Secret Instructions" which is reserved exclusively for the private guidance of the more advanced members. But as this secret code is disavowed by the Society - and since its authority is at least doubtful it is not necessary to describe it here in detail.

CREATION BY EVOLUTION.1

(From "The Theology of an Evolutionist.")

WHEN man would make a rose with tools, he fashions petals and leaves of wax, colors them, manufactures a stalk by the 1 Copyright, 1897, by Lyman Abbott. By permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

same mechanical process, and the rose is done. When God makes a rose, He lets a bird or a puff of wind drop a seed into the ground; out of the seed there emerges a stalk; and out of the stalk, branches; and on these branches, buds; and out of these buds roses unfold; and the rose is never done, for it goes on endlessly repeating itself. This is the difference between manufacture and growth. Man's method is the method of manufacture; God's method is the method of growth. What man makes is a finished product, death. What God makes is an always finishing and never finished product, life. What man makes has no reproductive power within itself. What God makes goes on reproducing itself, with ever new forms and in ever new vitality. The doctrine of evolution, in its radical form, is the doctrine that all God's processes are processes of growth, not processes of manufacture.

Evolution is the history of a process, not the explanation of a cause. The doctrine of evolution is an attempt on the part of scientific men to state what is the process of life; not an attempt to state what is the cause of life. When Isaac Newton discovered and announced the doctrine of attraction and gravitation, he did not undertake to explain why the apple falls from the bough to the earth, nor why the earth revolves around the sun in its orbit; he simply stated what he had seen, that all matter acts as if its bodies were attracted to one another inversely as the square of the distance. So the evolutionist does not attempt to explain the cause of phenomena; he simply recites their history.

A correspondent recently wrote me a letter saying in substance, "I am sorry that you have taken up with that dangerous doctrine of evolution. Huxley and Darwin and Tyndall tell us that matter somehow or other once upon a time began to create itself." He is mistaken. He would find it difficult to point to page or paragraph in any scientific writer as authority for any such notion of evolution. Evolution does not undertake to give the cause of phenomena at all; it simply recites their processes. A man may be an atheistic evolutionist, that is, he may believe that there is no intelligent cause lying back of phenomena. Haeckel is an atheistic evolutionist. Or he may be a theistic evolutionist, that is, he may believe that the cause lying back. of all phenomena is a divine, intelligent, loving Person; Dr. McCosh of Princeton was a theistic evolutionist. The evolu

tionist is simply one who understands the history of life to be a history of growth. "Evolution," says Mr. Huxley," or development, is at present employed in biology as a general name for the history of the steps by which any living being has acquired the morphological and physiological characters which distinguish it;" and on that Mr. Henry Drummond, an eminent evolutionist, comments as follows:

"Evolution is simply history, a history of steps, a general name for the history of the steps by which the world has come to what it is. According to this general definition, the story of evolution is narrative. It may be wrongly told; it may be colored, exaggerated, over or under stated, like the record of any other set of facts; it may be told with a theological bias, or with an anti-theological bias; theories of the process may be added by this thinker or by that, but these are not of the substance of the story. Whether history is told by a Gibbon or a Green, the facts remain; and whether evolution be told by a Haeckel or a Wallace, we accept the narrative so far as it is a rendering of nature, and no more. It is true, before this story can be fully told, centuries still must pass. At present, there is not a chapter of the record that is wholly finished. The manuscript is already worn with erasures, the writing is often blurred, the very language is uncouth and strange. Yet even now the outline of a continuous story is beginning to appear, a story whose chief credential lies in the fact that no imagination of man could have designed a spectacle so wonderful, or worked out a plot at once so intricate and so transcendently simple."

Evolution, then, let us understand this at the outset, — is the history of a process, not the explanation of a cause. The evolutionist believes that God's processes are the processes of growth, not of manufacture.

We are all partial evolutionists. Every man believes that to a large extent the divine processes are processes of growth. He believes that the rose grows from a seed or a cutting; that all the vegetable matter in the world has come to its present condition by growth from earlier forms. He believes that this principle of growth applies to the animal as well as to the vegetable kingdom. He believes that every horse was once a colt, and every man was once a babe. He believes, too, in growth as a principle of history: that the American nation has grown from colonial to national greatness; that literature has grown