ANIMAL LIKENESS.
People have a way of saying of those they admire greatly: "She has the face of an angel," or "She is a perfect beauty," "Beauty beyond compare," et al, according to their ideas of what constitutes absolute beauty; but the human countenances that have in them no faintest suggestion of the kingdom below us are very rare. If one looks attentively at the faces of the crowd as it surges along the most attractive street, there may be seen on review surprising resemblances. A man looking like an elephant, another like a toad, bull dogs and wolves galore, beneficent faces of old people, calm and patient, resembling work-worn horses, always folk of both sexes who suggest sheep,—now and again a cantankerous billy goat. You may be sure that the vast numbers of reptiles are not left out of the human representation, and the birds, too. The "eagle eye," and the carnivorous beak require no introduction to the menagerie, they belong there. But the felines have it, the cats, little and big, monopolize the show. Men regard a recognized resemblance to the king of beasts—the lion—a compliment to their natural powers and rightful rulership, while women have to put up with being considered cats, and many of them prove by their cattish doings their resemblance to their animal ancestry. There are babies everywhere about. It is disheartening to peer into their tiny faces and see in so many of their eyes no "speculation," no suggestion of intelligence. They remind you of the eyes of a fish.
Human beings have through them strains suggestive of the animal kingdom. It seems quite right to expect each one to act like the creature he resembles, when under the stress of violent emotion.
NATURAL SUPERSTITION.
At the creation of the race there was thrown around it such safeguards as should tend to its continuance. These were, of course, implanted in the crude mentality of undeveloped man. Underlying all the rest and the most important to its perpetuation was fear. The ignorant child has no fear of consequences attendant upon any action; experience teaches him to know what they are, and how to protect himself from them. This was the first lesson of primitive man, and when, through the exercise of his inventive faculties, he had mastered his visible foes, the animal monsters surrounding him and threatening his life, and he found himself confronted by the action of terrible forces which he could not grasp or see, he, by analogy, endowed them with personality, and such attributes as he knew himself to be possessed of, adding thereto powers and possibilities which were limited only by his own imagination. This was the very beginning of the working of the mental in him, and while it was most grotesque and unreasoning, it yet drew a sharp line between the mere animal and the animal man, and his whole life being spent in conflict with his foes, he naturally carried forward his growing perceptions of the existence of supernatural powers which were influencing his life upon the same basis, i. e., of an unending warfare, wherein he must always be the one attacked and vanquished. Fear of the animal world developed into a shivering terror of the invisible, and so deep and lasting was this first impression of the spiritual world upon his crude faculties, that it was made an universal heredity among all races and peoples. It exists everywhere today, even among those who profess to be living in the light of a higher revelation of God's purpose in the life of man.
ADAPTIVENESS OF MAN.
The most surprising and extraordinary quality of mind manifested by man is his ready power of adaptation to whatever may become a part of his earthly experiences. It, alone, assures his continual progress upon all lines of growth connected not only with his earthly but also his immortal career. Great inventions, unexpected discoveries, and astounding revelations may stagger him for a moment; but the facility with which he finally absorbs all the hitherto unknown outworkings of science and natural law, and assimilates them to his inner sense of the fitness of things, changing all his relationship to his material life, and forcing himself to a readjustment not only of his mental perceptions, but also of his external existence gives proof sufficient of his being not only favored of the gods, but also of his near kinship with them. The marvels of mechanics, the divinely beautiful representations of art, and the exalted inspirations of literature were never so sought after, or so appreciated by large portions of the race as at the present time. The peasant's cot today is made comfortable and beautified by accessories which within our historical knowledge could not be commanded by kings and princes possessed of great riches.
The spiritual origin of the splendid architecture of the great "white city" and later of the southern expositions is perfectly apparent to the eye of the mystic and the seer, and these vast, concentrated exhibits of the world's work are object lessons of which the influence can never be outlived even by the careless and unobserving. Today the great leaders of men, led by inspiring thoughts which would have appalled their forefathers, perfect schemes for overcoming the obstacles inhering in the vast forces of nature, and harness them into subservience to the growing needs of the race.
What devil-worshippers those old chaps were! To him they ascribed all power over things animate and inanimate, and the effrontery of the man who should have even mentioned the possibility of talking over a wire, thousands of miles, or of utilizing the forces of Niagara, or of hundreds of inventions now in use in the most commonplace surroundings would have been met with condign punishment. Our inventors would be in dungeons instead of their comfortable laboratories, and our great engineers would long ago have lost their heads. What a time we have had getting the devil out of our mechanical life! Now he can only rule in the immaterial world, in the crude imaginations of the ignorant and superstitious.