We have difficulty in comprehending processes for which we find no analogy in things familiar. Even were it possible for us to know in detail the way in which the body of man was formed and then endowed with the power of procreation, insuring the perpetuity of the race, it would throw but little light upon the subject of the ultimate origin of man. We know but little of things beyond the sphere upon which we live except as information has been revealed by a power superior to that of earth, and by an intelligence above that of man. Notwithstanding the assumption that man is the culmination of an evolutionary development from a lower order of beings, we know that the body of man today is in the very form and fashion of his spirit, except indeed for disfigurements and deformities. The perfect body is the counterpart of the perfect spirit and the two are the constituent entities of the soul.

By What Standard?

Much depends upon the standard by which we judge as to whether any particular organism shall be pronounced of high or lower rank. By the standard of powers of flight, in which the bird excels, man is a very inferior being; if judged by fleetness of foot he is far below the deer; by gage of strength he is inferior to the horse and the elephant; and yet man holds dominion over these and all other living things of earth. In certain important points of body-structure man stands low in the scale if he be graded strictly in accordance with the accepted standard of mammalian anatomy.

In the course of creative events the earth came to a condition fitted for the abiding place of the sons and daughters of God; and then Adam came forth upon the earth. But the beginning of man's mortal existence upon the earth was not the beginning of man; he had lived before, even as he shall life after the earth has passed away and its place taken by a new earth and a new heaven.

Man and the Ape

It has been stated by certain extremists that evolution affirms that man is in the line of posterity from the ape. But scientists today discredit this view. The most that even radical evolutionists assert is that the similarity of structure between man and certain apes indicates the possibility of a common ancestor of the two but between man and the ape there are more essential differences than resemblances.

True, man does not excel in strength of limb, agility, or speed, but in the God-given powers of mind and in the possession of superior ambition and effort. Hear the words of one who until his death was regarded as among the foremost of American geologists, James D. Dana:

“Man's origin has thus far no sufficient explanation from science. His close relations in structure to the man-apes are unquestionable. They have the same number of bones with two exceptions, and the bones are the same in kind and structure. The muscles are mostly the same. Both carry their young in their arms. The affiliations strongly suggest community of descent. But the divergencies ... especially the cases of degeneracy in man's structure, exhibited in his palmigrade feet and the primitive character of his teeth, allying him in these respects to the Lower Eocene forms, are admitted proof that he has not descended from any type of ape. In addition, man's erect posture makes the gap a very broad one. The brute, the ape included, has powerful muscles in the back of the neck to carry the head in its horizontal position, while man has no such muscles, as anyone of the species can prove by crawling for a while on ‘all fours.’ Beyond this, the great size of the brain, his eminent intellectual and moral qualities, his voice and speech, give him sole title to the position at the head of the kingdoms of life. In this high position, he is able to use Nature as his work-mate, his companion, and his educator, and to find perpetual delight in her harmonies and her revelations. ...

“Whatever the results of further search, we may feel assured, in accord with Wallace, who shares with Darwin in the authorship of the theory of Natural ‘Selection, that the intervention of a Power above nature as at the basis of man's development. Believing that Nature exists through the will and ever-acting power of the Divine Being, and that all its great truths, its beauties, its harmonies, are manifestations of His wisdom and power, or, in the words nearly of Wallace, that the whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actually is, the will of one Supreme Intelligence. Nature, with man as its culminant species, is no longer a mystery.” James D. Dana, Manual of Geology, 4th edition, page 1036.

These lines were written before the death of the writer—and constitute his last testament and testimony as to the origin of the species to which he himself belonged.

Man's Place in Nature

In the work already cited, the same author wrote:

“Man stands in the successional line of the quadrumana, at the head of the animal kingdom. But he is not a primate among primates. The quadrumana are, as Cuvier called them, quadrumana from the first to the last. They are brute mammals, as is manifested in their carnivore-like canines and their powerful jaws; in their powerful muscular development; in their walking on all fours, and the adaption thereto exhibited in the vertebrae, producing the convexity of the back; and also in other parts of the skeleton. Man, on the contrary, is not quadrumanous. ...

“Man was the first being, in the geological succession, capable of an intelligent survey of Nature and a comprehension of her laws; the first capable of augmenting his strength by bending nature to his service, rendering thereby a weak body stronger than all possible animal force; the first capable of deriving happiness from truth and goodness; of apprehending eternal right; of reaching toward a knowledge of self and God; the first, therefore, capable of conscious obedience or disobedience of a moral law, and the first subject to debasement of his moral nature through his appetites.

“There is in man, therefore, a spiritual element in which the brute has no share. His power of indefinite progress, his thoughts and desires that look onward even beyond time, his recognition of spiritual existence and of a Divinity above, all evince a nature that partakes of the infinite and divine. Man is linked to the past through the system of life, of which he is the last, the completing, creation. But, unlike other species of that closing system of the past, he, through his spiritual nature, is more intimately connected with the opening future.” —Dana, pages 1017-18.

A Later Authority

Let me cite a later authority than Dana. Among the living no anthropologist has been more pronounced in upholding the theories of Darwin and Lamarck than Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn.

By the theories mentioned man was said to have risen from tree-climbing ape-like ancestors. In his address as retiring president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, December, 1929, Dr. Osborn affirms the untenability of the views he had so long and aggressively advocated. He regards the human bones unearthed at Piltdown, Sussex, England, as typical of the “Dawn Man,” who was in every distinguishing characteristic, a man, not part man and part ape, but as to brain capacity and other evidences of mentality equal to some races now living. Yet Osborn holds to a communal origin of man and anthropoids related in structure, away back in the late Tertiary age of geologic history.

Thus theories come, endure for a season and go, like the fungi of the night; nevertheless they serve their purpose as temporary aids in human thought and endeavor.

The Time Element

The outstanding point of difference between those who take the opening chapters of Genesis and cognate scriptures as a the whole and only reliable record of the creation of earth and man, and the students of earth-science who fail to find an adequate record in scripture, is the point of time during which man in some state has lived on the planet.

Geologists and anthropologists say that if the beginning of Adamic history dates back but 6000 years or less, there must have been races of human sort upon earth long before that time—without denying, however, that Adamic history may be correct, if it be solely regarded solely as the history of the Adamic race.

This view postulates, by application of Dana's affirmation already quoted: “that the intervention of a power above Nature” brought about the placing of, let me say, Adam upon earth.

It is but fair to say that no reconciliation of these opposing conceptions has been effected to the satisfaction of both parties. We have not yet learned how to correlate geologic time-periods with terms of years, except as estimates, for which no absolutely dependable foundation may be found.

Nobility of Adam's Race

I do not regard Adam as related to—certainly not as descended from—the Neanderthal, the Cro-Magnon, the Peking or the Piltdown man. Adam came as divinely directed, created and empowered, and stands as the patriarchal head of his posterity—a posterity, who, if true to the laws of God, are heirs to the Priesthood and to the glories of eternal lives.

Were it true that man is a product of evolution from lower forms, it is but reasonable to believe that he will yet develop into something higher. While it is a fact that eternal progression is a characteristic of man's Divine birthright, as yet we have learned nothing to indicate that man shall develop physically into any other form than that in which he now appears.

Many attempts have been made by those who regard man as an animal to frame some definition by which he may be distinctively described among his fellow animals; but of such attempts none have been satisfactorily successful. The difficulty lies in the fact already stated, that man differs from the animal creation not only in degree but in kind; he is the only being who has any conception of a preexistent state or an existence beyond the grave; the only being whose thoughts turn toward God and who feels in his soul the inspiring impulses of kinship to Deity. Believe not those who would make man but little above the brutes, when in truth he is but little below the angels, and if faithful shall pass by the angels and take his place among the exalted sons of God. The spirit of man is the offspring of the Eternal Father, and his body, if unmarred, is in the very form and fashion of that spirit.

The Ante-Mortal State

We have been told that Jesus Christ is in very truth our Elder Brother, and as to His preexistence in the spirit state there is little room for question. That His spirit was in the form of the earthly body which He afterward took, and which body was slain, buried, and resurrected, and with which body He ascended into heaven, is attested by scripture. Going back to the time immediately following the dispersion from Babel, we read of a prophet to whom the unembodied Lord revealed Himself, saying: “Behold, this body, which ye now behold, is the body of my spirit; and man have I created after the body of my spirit; and even as I appear unto thee to be in the spirit will I appear unto my people in the flesh.” (Book of Mormon, Ether, 3:16).

It is evident from this scripture that in His preexistent state, that is to say in the state in which He existed prior to His earthly birth, Jesus Christ had the same form and stature that He afterward presented in the flesh. By natural processes His spirit shaped for itself a body from the material of earth, which body underwent a course of graded development until it reached maturity, in which state that body was the counterpart tot he spirit whose material tabernacle it was. As with Jesus, so with all the sons and daughters of God; each had a spiritual existence before he entered upon this stage of mortal existence, and in each case the body is formed and fashioned by the power of the immortal spirit. In this process of body-shaping, the spirit may be hindered, hampered, and interfered with, through influences of heredity, through prenatal defects, or through accident and disease.

As to how were formed the bodies of the first human beings to take tabernacles, the revealed word gives no details while science has practically nothing to offer by way of explanation. As Dana so positively declares in the work already cited “Man's origin has thus far no sufficient explanation from science.”