In the evening attended with Bro. Caine a lecture by Henry Ward Beecher, “evolution and revolution.” I did not like the lecture. It was a weak affair, I thought, for a man of his reputation. He spoke of man as being on the earth at least 280,000 years. He expressed himself as being indifferent as to where he came from; it was where he was going to, what his destiny would be, that gave him concern. He did not care if <he> was descended from a monkey, if he was only descended far enough. He knew he was not a monkey now. He fully believes in evolution. He said it was all wrong to say that mankind had fallen from and through Adam; Adam, if he fell at all, had fallen upward; mankind had been going forward and upward. He appeared to ridiculed the idea that man had fallen, and the story of the Garden of Eden and the prohibition to not eat of the fruit of two trees.