many, but supreme over all. He is the beginning and end of all things. He is equal with God. He made the worlds. He is the head of creation, and upholds all things by the word of His power. All the angels of God worship Him. On His head are many crowns. The wheels of Providence all move at His bidding, and the universe awaits the decisions of His will.

To compare Mohammed with Christ is like comparing a flickering candle with the splendour of the mid-day sun, or the dome of St. Paul's with the magnificence of the over-arching heavens.

Again, the doctrines of Mohammedanism are not to be compared with the doctrines of Christianity. There are, undoubtedly, many beautiful and sublime statements about God and religion in the Arabian Bible. But it may also be said that there is nothing beautiful or grand in the Korân which cannot, in a higher form, be found in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Korân is a miscellaneous collection of ethical scraps, and poetic descriptions, which have been gathered from Old Testament documents, and traditions, and from the fanciful legends of a corrupted Christianity. The great distinctive doctrines of the Gospel have no place in it.

The doctrines of the Incarnation, the Atonement, and the Intercession of the Great High Priest, are utterly ignored.

The doctrine of the Trinity was a stumbling block to the mind of Mohammed. The following statement is said to be equal in value to a third of the whole of the Korân-" Say God, is one God; the Eternal God: He begetteth not, neither is begotten: and there is not any one like unto Him." Again: "They are certainly infidels who say that God is the third of three; for there is no God besides one God.” Those doctrines of the Gospel which are absent from the Korân are the very truths most needed to satisfy the wants of the soul, and restore the nature of man.

The Incarnation meets that craving after a knowledge of God, and a sight of God, which is deeply fixed in the human heart, and which has manifested itself in all nations. The Atonement, as a divine satisfaction for sin, is adapted to relieve the soul of that burden of guilt which sometimes presses it to the earth, and unfits it for the activities of life.

The continued Intercession of Christ on behalf of those who through the power of temptation are drawn into sin, is one of the most comforting and sustaining truths of Scripture. It gives encouragement to the desponding, and imparts life to the dead.

These are the distinctive and fundamental doctrines which belong exclusively to the Gospel. They are designed for the benefit of all men. They hold the germs of all that is pure in morals, beautiful in character, enduring in civilization, and noble and glorious in history.

With regard to that terrible and tragical struggle which has for so many months been scattering desolation and death over some of the fairest regions of Europe and Asia, whatever may be our politics we may agree to pray, God speed the Gospel. Whatever good Mohammedanism may have done in the past it has had its day. It is doomed.

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It must fall. The policy of statesmen cannot preserve it. The idea of God which was a purifying and elevating power in the mind of the Arabian Reformer has become extinct in the mind of the modern Turk. The Mohammedanism of Turkey is a rotting carcass. Death shall feed upon it, destruction shall swallow it up.

But the same conviction which gives us the assurance that Islam must perish imparts to us the strong belief in the ultimate triumph of Christianity. Creeds may break down and fall from the memory, but the spirit of the living Christ will not forsake the nations. Christ must reign. His kingdom must grow. His truth must triumph. A brighter light shall yet gleam through the darkness which has so long overshadowed the world. The uprising of the down-trodden peoples will be for the good of the world. Tyranny, priestcraft, oppression, and superstition, shall disappear. Liberty, the gift of heaven, the birthright of humanity, the purchase of the cross, the gospel of the apostles, and the crown of the martyrs, shall lift her royal banner over the struggling nations, and bid a wondering and rejoicing world admire the power, love, and majesty of Him who came to loose the bonds of the prisoners, and set the captives free.

Sir A. Gull on Alcohol.

I THINK that instead of flying to alcohol, as many people do when they are exhausted, they might very well drink water, or that they might very well take food, and would be very much better without the alcohol. If I am fatigued with overwork, personally, my food is very simple! I eat the raisins instead of drinking the wine. I have had a very large experience in that practice for thirty years. This is my own personal experience, and I believe it is a very good and true experience.

I should join issue at once with those people who believe that intellectual work cannot be so well done without wine or alcohol. I should deny that proposition, and hold the very opposite. It is one of the commonest things in English society, that people are injured by drink without being drunkards. It goes on so quietly it is even very difficult to observe. There is a great deal of injury done to health by the habitual use of wines in their various kinds, and alcohol in its various shapes, even in so-called moderate quantities. It leads to the degeneration of tissues; it spoils the health, and it spoils the intellect.

I think, as a rule, you might stop the supply of alcohol at once without injury. It is said in some cases the brain has entirely gone from leaving drink off suddenly; but that is fallacious, the brain may have gone from previous habits. I hardly know any more potent cause of disease than alcohol, leaving out of view the fact that it is a frequent source of crime of all descriptions. I am persuaded that lecturers should go about the country lecturing to people of the middle and upper-middle classes upon the disadvantages of alcohol as it is daily used.

I do not see any good in leaving off drink by degrees. If you are taking poison into the blood, I do not see the advantage of diminishing the degrees of it from day to day. That point has been frequently put to me by medical men; but my reply has been, "If your patient were poisoned by arsenic, would you still go on putting in the arsenic ?

I should say, from my experience, that alcohol is the most destructive agent that we are aware of in this country.

-Evidence before the Lord's Select Committee on Intemperance, July, 1877.

BY THOMAS HENSON.

WE have two accounts of the origin of man. The first is an oldfashioned one, found in the book of Genesis. Thus it reads: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air; and over the cattle, and over all the earth; and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him, male and female created He them. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul."

The other account is not so old, but neither is quite modern. It is given by Charles Darwin, in his "Descent of Man," second edition, 1875. Thus it reads: "The most ancient progenitors in the kingdom of the vertebrata, at which we are able to obtain an obscure glance, apparently consisted of a group of marine animals, resembling the larvæ of existing Ascidians. These animals probably gave rise to a group of fishes, as lowly organised as the lancelot and from these the ganoids, and other fishes like the Lepidosiren, must have been developed. From such fish a very small advance would carry us on to the Amphibians. We have seen that birds and reptiles were once intimately connected together; and the Monotremata now connect mammals with reptiles in a slight degree. But no one can at present say by what line of descent the three higher and related classes, namely, mammals, birds, and reptiles, were derived from the two lower vertebrati classes, namely, amphibians and fishes. In the class of mammals the steps are not difficult to conceive which led from the ancient Monotremata to the ancient Marsupials and from these to the early progenitors of the placental mammals. We may thus ascend to the Lemuridæ, and the interval is not very wide from these to the Simiada. The Simiadæ then branched off into two great stems, the New World and the Old World Monkeys; and from the latter, at a remote period, Man, the wonder and glory of the Universe, proceeded."

The first of these accounts is simple, beautiful, grand, and unoppressive. The second reminds us of a huge, lightless lantern, in a dark, starless night; and after reading it, we have to stop and recover breath, before proceeding. We think with John Stuart Mill, that this theory of evolution in the struggle for existence, and the survival of the fittest, "is very startling, and prima facia, improbable." Evidently the two stories do not agree, nor can they be reconciled. Either Darwin, like the lean and ill-favoured kine coming up from the Nile, must eat up and destroy the beautiful story of Genesis, or, he must pale before it, as the glow-worm does before the sun. Indeed, he has set himself to accomplish the former, for he says, "I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations." We have read his book with much care, and feeling much like Galileo as he rose from his knees and recantation of truth, we cannot help saying, Darwin notwithstanding, "Man was created though."

Mr. Darwin relies upon three lines of evidence in support of his theory, viz., (1.) Homologous structures in man and the lower animals;

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(2.) similarity of embryonic development with the lower animals; (3.) rudimentary remains of the lower animals in man. The edifice which the indefatigable naturalist has built up out of these materials, suggests the idea of a pretentious castle, constructed of cardboard and sand. No wonder that his reasoning and illustrations have provoked a good deal of mirth, and his position been assailed and demolished from every side by earnest men, philsophers, scientists, and theologians-his doughty champion, Professor Huxley, notwithstanding. The similarity of structure in man and the lower animals may be true to a certain extent; but it is equally true that the dis-similarity is also immensely great. Cellular tissues and blood corpuscles differ so widely, that that which is life and hilarity to them would be agony and death to him. Even so it is also in the vegetable kingdom. Mr. Darwin wishes us to believe that similarity of structure is due to community of origin; but if so, to what is the well-known greater dis-similarity due? writer in the British Quarterly, October, 1871, said, "The fact of similarity of structure may be accepted, but the proposed explanation of the fact, is, after all, only an assertion." Nor does the second line of argument, embryonic development, fare better at the hands of men qualified to deal with it. Again and again it has been shown that Mr. Darwin might have made more of the fact than he has done; but that when the most has been made of it, the argument falls to pieces, crumbles to dust by the weight of its own materials. The third argument, "Rudimentary remains of the lower animals in man," raises the question whether Mr. Darwin really hoped to produce conviction, or only intended to amuse. He defines rudiments as "Organs which are absolutely useless, or they are of such slight service to their present possessors, that we can hardly suppose they were developed under the conditions which now exist." But how does he know that these organs are useless? Does the anatomist or the naturalist fully understand all the uses of each and every organ of the human body? Elsewhere he says, "I am convinced, from the light gained during even the last few years, that very many structures which now appear to us useless, will hereafter be proved to be useful, and will therefore come within the range of natural selection." We are convinced by the study of Mr. Darwin's book that these structures, which appear to him to be useless, are even now, and from the first have been, useful, and that they have ever been within the range, not of that blind, inanimate, lifeless deity, natural selection; but of that living, loving Designer and Preserver, the Eternal God.

But far heavier objections lie against Mr. Darwin's theory, when we consider his account of the origin of man's mental, moral, and religious nature. Nothing is allowed for Divine implanting, communication, or creation. Natural selection did not develop these bodies with all their adaptive organs, and then offer the thing, like an earthen bottle, to some greater deity, to be filled up with subtle mind, moral faculties, and religious propensities. No. Man has been called "a religious animal;" but he evolved his religion, as he did his bones and muscles, out of his material surroundings and constitution. So Mr. Darwin teaches. It would be immensely amusing, were it not almost infinitely saddening, to follow him through the tortuous maze of reasoning by which he seeks to establish his false position. An illustration or two must suffice.

so;

"Man," he says, "manifestly owes his immense superiority to his intellectual faculties, his social habits, and his corporeal structure." Perhaps but how came he with those intellectual faculties? Mr. Darwin feels that the great difference in mental power between man and the lower animals, suggests an error in his conclusion as to man's descent from them. He is conscious that the difference in this respect is enormous, even between the lowest savage, who cannot count higher than four, and the most highly organised ape; but he says, "It can be shown that there is no fundamental difference of mental power between them.' No fundamental difference between the lowest savage and the highest ape! Look at the Cherokee and other North American Indians, at the Fijian cannibals and the Erromanga savages; you have taught these and others as low as them to read, to write, to understand the grammar of language, to cultivate literature, to understand and to glory in the cross of Christ and the story of redeeming love: has Mr. Darwin or Professor Huxley ever done that with the chimpanzee or the orang? Has any one before them done it? Can it be done? Will Mr. Darwin leave his pigeon breeding, and devote his time and energies for the remainder of his life to the effort of educating and exalting ape minds to the level reached by these low savages, by way of demonstrating that there is no fundamental difference of mental power between them? A fundamental difference of mental power might constitute the impassable barrier; but if there is no such difference, let him at least make the attempt. He thinks it as hopeless to find the origin of mental development as to find the origin of life itself; yet he seems to account for mind as a development of the lowest instinct, step by step, simple, then complex, through endless variations, until emotions, first simple, then complex, gave rise to sensations, these to passions, and so on, till the mind, whatever it was, was completed in the lowest savage-from which civilisation and culture have made it what it is. Mr. Darwin finds that the hands of a man and an ape are constructed on the same general principle; and he learns from his friend Huxley "that there can be no dispute as to the similarity of fundamental character between the ape's brains and man's." If this is so, we ask again, Why has not the ape advanced beyond the limited circle of its instinct into the road of endless progression pursued by man? Listen to the Duke of Argyll. "The difference between the hand of a monkey and the hand of a man may seem small when they are both placed on the dissecting table; but in that difference, whatever it may be, lies the whole difference between an organ limited to the climbing of trees or the plucking of fruit, and an organ which is so correlated with man's inventive genius, that by its aid the earth is weighed, and the distance of the sun is measured." Mr. Darwin points to the opening of mind in a child as analogous to the opening of it in a dog, and says that "to doubt the progress of animals in intellectual and other mental faculties, is to beg the question of evolution of species." Well, we beg nothing. We demand proof that mind is incipient in a dog as it is in a child. All along the known history of man, he has been a thinking, inventive being, progressively reducing earth, air, fire, water, metals, minerals, and even lightning, to his use and pleasure; but nowhere in geologic records, nor in later history, can Messrs. Darwin and Huxley find traces of this being done by the most highly organised gorilla, orang, or chimpanzee.