Creation is thus God's great object lesson for men and angels to learn.

But learning is a process, gradual, slow, from one step to another.

Therefore the object lesson must not be precipitated all in a heap upon the infantile intellects of the learners, but unfolded by degrees.

Geologists assure us that so it was in the past; that first the lifeless strata were deposited; next, light was evolved; afterward, fishes, and marine reptiles, and birds; then came the carboniferous or plant era; afterward the mammalia; last of all man.

You observe here an ascending scale of creation, beginning with first principles and simple forms, and ascending to the most complicated; a series of experiments in God's great lecture-room, illustrative of the various steps of the evolution of the divine idea.