All of nature's processes are slow and always evolutionary. The
controlling laws are subtle and secret and can never be comprehended or
understood save as they work out in visible results. There is every
indication that it has required an illimitable series of ages to evolve
even the physical form of man in the unnumbered races of the human
family from the first semi-human life to man as we see him now--clever
and strong of brain and will, daring and equal to great emergencies,
and in inventive, creative and executive gifts a very god of power and
might. The laws of evolution refer primarily to the individual planet,
Earth, and include all that it contains--in a word, all things in any
way related to it. Mineral deposits and crumbling rocks nourish the
vegetable world; the vegetable world provides sustenance to the animal
kingdom, and it, in turn, with all the others combined, sustains all
human life; but its real root, its permanent existence, is in the
planet itself. Each and all of these diverse manifestations of law
coordinated, constitute the mysterious modes and methods of the
evolution of life from the lower to the higher status of being, and it
works on, and ever on eternally, till human life finds its completion
and satisfaction in the fulfillment of the law which merges the
advanced and prepared soul in the Universal Spirit and crowns its final
evolution with its at-one-ment with its Creator.
Nature does not duplicate her handiwork, but cunningly sets her sign on
every leaf and branch to insure individuality. She throws protecting
arms around all her growing life of fruit and vegetable in order that
each shall reproduce of its own kind, and thus keep intact the orderly
succession, and that there shall be no lack of nourishment for the
children of men.
She gives without stint to all the peoples of the earth her world-stuff
to be worked over into human flesh, and animal fibre. But no tiniest
grain of her possessions has ever, or will ever escape from her hand,
and the daily debris from all earth-made bodies is her constant toll.
When the forms are set free from the life principle which has pervaded
them in their earthly career, the circle is rounded, and when the
grave-rite, dust to native dust we here restore to our great mother is
uttered, she is the gainer; for the operation of thus passing the
material of which the planet is made through the highest created forms
of life, brings it into a certain relationship to spirit, and thus the
evolution, the spiritualization of the world-stuff of the planet itself
is going forward.