Chapter IV: Part 4

But the Old Testament covers many centuries, and within its range we can trace a steady growth, and that growth always of the same character, and always pointing towards what the Gospel finally revealed. The strength of the moral sentiment in the earlier books is always assigned to the belief in, and reverence for, Almighty God. It is evidently held to be more important to believe in God and to fear Him than to see the perfection of His holiness. If we distinguish between Religion and Morality, Religion is made the more important of the two. It is more important to recognise that the holy God exists and reigns than to see clearly in what His holiness, and indeed all holiness, consists. The sentiment of reverence is more important than the perception of that universality which we now know to be the essential characteristic of the Moral Law. In analysing the origin and nature of Religion in the second of these Lectures, it was necessary to follow the order of thought, and beginning with Duty to end with God. But the order of fact is not the same. In actual fact man began with God and ends with a clearer perception of Duty. Hence in all the earlier stages the morality is imperfect. The profaneness of Esau is a serious offence. The ungenerous temper, the unfairness and duplicity of Jacob are light in comparison. Truth is not an essential. Blood-shedding and impurity when in horrible excess are treated as most grievous sins; but restrained within limits are easily condoned. Women are placed below their true and natural place; polygamy if not distinctly allowed is certainly condoned; divorce is permitted on one side, not on the other. Slavery is allowed though put under regulation. But the unity and spirituality of God are guarded with the strongest sanctions, and nothing could be said against idolatry and polytheism now, in sterner and clearer language than was used then. The reverence for God required then was as great as the reverence required now. But the conception of the holiness which is the main object of that reverence has changed; has in fact been purified and cleared. And the change is traceable in the Old Testament. The prophets teach a higher morality than is found in the earlier books. Cruelty is condemned as it had not been before. The heathen are not regarded as outside God's love, and the future embraces them in His mercy even if the present does not. Conscience begins to be recognised and appealed to. Idolatry is not merely forbidden, its folly is exposed; it is treated not only with condemnation, but with scorn. Individual responsibility is insisted on. Children are not held responsible for their fathers, though the inheritance of moral evil and of the consequences of moral evil is never denied. And even trust in God rises to a higher level in Habakkuk's declaration that that trust shall never be shaken by any calamity that may befall him, than in the earlier belief that calamities would never befall those who held fast that trust.

If we review this progress in moral teaching we recognise that it corresponds to the natural and for the most part unconscious working of that instinctive test which, as was pointed out before, we apply to all moral questions, the test of universality. The pivots of all the prophetical teaching are the incessant inculcation of justice and mercy; justice which requires us to recognise the rights of others side by side with our own; mercy which demands our sympathy with the feelings of other creatures that can feel.

We are bound to recognise the claims of others to equal treatment with ourselves, and any refusal or apparent refusal to do so must be justified by a universal rule applicable to all alike. The perpetual attempt to justify exceptions in this way is sure to end in diminishing the number of those exceptions. If we are compelled to think much of the position of woman in marriage, we are sure at last to come to Malachi's declaration that God hateth putting away. If we are compelled to think of the position of slaves, we cannot continue for ever to believe that there are some beings with consciences and free wills, who nevertheless, because of the accidents of their lives, have no rights at all; and we acknowledge the righteousness of Jeremiah's denunciation of the breach of covenant when the nobles of Judah re-enslaved those whom they had solemnly emancipated. If we think of the nature of responsibility and the justification of punishment, we find it impossible to believe that an innocent man shall be rightly punished for the wrong-doing of another, even if that other be his father or his mother; and we are convinced that Ezekiel is speaking God's words when he proclaims on God's behalf that 'the soul that sinneth it shall die; the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.' And once more, whatever divine purpose gave the chosen people a priority among all peoples in knowledge of divine will and possession of divine favour, it is impossible to find any rule by which this priority shall for ever exclude all other peoples from being within the range of God's manifested love; and conscience cannot but accept as a divine message that the Gentiles also shall come to the Heavenly 'Light, and their kings to the brightness of His rising.' So again, to turn from justice to mercy, we recognise that we are bound to spare pain to all creatures that can feel, and this duty can only be set aside by some higher duty which makes that pain the means to a higher moral end. And if we are set by our consciences to seek for some rule of universal application for this purpose, it becomes perpetually clearer that nothing can excuse cruel punishments inflicted on criminals or enemies, or hard-hearted indifference to the poor and the weak. Our own nature cries out for kindness in our pain, and that very cry from within compels our consciences to listen to the cry from without. And the denunciations of cruelty and oppression we recognise as we hear them to be the voice of God.

But however true it be that this progress corresponds exactly throughout with the necessary working of the great moral principles implanted in the spiritual faculty, it nevertheless remains true also that all this teaching in its successive stages is given by men who did not profess to be working out a philosophical system, but who claimed to bring a message from God, to speak by His authority, and in many cases to be trusted with special powers in proof of possessing that authority. Looking back over it afterwards we can see that the teaching in its successive stages was a development, but it always took the form of a revelation. And its life was due to that fact. As far as it is possible to judge, that union between Morality and Religion, between duty and faith, without which both religion and morality soon wither out of human consciences, can only be secured--has only been secured--by presenting spiritual truth in this form of a Revelation.

When we pass to the New Testament, all that has previously been taught in the Old, in so far as it is related to the new teaching at all, is related as the bud to the flower. The development, if it be indeed a development, is so great, so sudden, so strange, that it seems difficult to recognise that it is a development at all.

First, the morality is in form, if not in substance, absolutely new. The duty of justice and mercy is pushed at once to its extreme limits, even to the length of entire self-surrender. The disciple has his own rights no doubt, as every other man has his; but he is required to leave his rights in God's hands and to think of the rights of others only. The highest place is assigned to meekness in conduct and humility in spirit. The humility of the Sermon on the Mount may possibly by careful analysis be shown to be identical at bottom with the magnanimity of Aristotle's Ethics. But the presentation of the two is so utterly opposed that in the effect on life the identity is altogether lost. And as justice and mercy, so too self-discipline is pushed as far as it can go. Instead of the enjoyment of life being an integral part of the aim set before the will, hunger and thirst for righteousness, and penitence for failure in keeping to it, are to fill up the believer's hopes for himself. Of inward satisfaction and peace he is often assured; but these, and these only, are the means to that peace. The disciple's life is to consist in bearing the cross, and bearing it cheerfully; in returning good for evil, and love for indifference and even for hatred; in detaching his affections from all the pleasures to be obtained from external things; in fixing his trust and his love on his Eternal Father. Taken as a whole, this is quite unlike all moral teaching that preceded it, and there is no indication that any philosophy could ever have evolved it. It has fastened on the human conscience from the day that it was uttered; and whatever moral teaching since has not been inspired from this source has soon passed out of power and been forgotten. We find when we examine that it exactly agrees with the fundamental teaching of the spiritual faculty when that teaching is applied to such creatures as we are, and to such a God as the New Testament sets before us. But we find it impossible to assert that by any working of human thought this morality could have been obtained by the spiritual faculty unaided. On the contrary, it seems more near the truth to say that we could never have obtained so clear a conception of the great Moral Law, if the teaching of the New Testament had not enlightened and purified the spiritual faculty itself. And to this is to be added that the moral teaching of the New Testament recognises what we may now almost consider a proved necessity of our nature, or at least a sure characteristic of the government of the world, that perpetual progress without which nothing human seems to keep sweet and wholesome. Perfect as the New Testament morality is in spirit, it is nevertheless imperfect in actual precepts. It leaves questions to be solved some of which have not been solved yet. It left slavery untouched, though assuredly doomed. It said nothing of patriotism. It gave no clear command concerning the right use of wealth. It laid down no principles for the government of states, though such principles must have a moral basis. There has been a perpetual growth in the understanding and in the application of this perfect teaching, and there will yet be a growth. Of no philosophical system of morals is it possible to say the same.

But in the second place, the New Testament contains not only a new morality, it contains also a new account of human nature. The mystery of that discord which makes the noblest and best of human souls a scene of perpetual internal conflict is acknowledged and its counterpart in God's dealings with mankind is set forth. The struggle between the spiritual faculty asserting its due supremacy, and the lower passions and appetites, impulses and inclinations, is so described by Saint Paul that none have ever since questioned his description with any effect. And our Lord's teaching of our absolute dependence on God and helplessness without Him; and Saint John's teaching that the whole world, outside Christ, 'lieth in the wicked one,' lay down the same truth. And as the mystery of moral evil in mankind is thus set forth, so too the mystery of the remedy for that evil. In the love of God shown in the Cross of Christ, in our union with God through that same Death upon the Cross is the power which conquers evil in the soul and carries a man ever upward to spiritual heights. And as all profounder thinkers have confessed the truth of the account thus given of the internal contradiction of man's moral nature, so have all believers borne witness (and only they could bear witness) to the account thus given of the solution of that contradiction and the renovation of that nature. Millions have lived and died in the Christian faith since the teaching recorded in the New Testament was given, and among them have been the purest, the justest, the most self-sacrificing, the most heavenly-minded of mankind. And they all concur in saying that the one stay of all their spiritual lives has been communion with God through Christ.

Thirdly, the New Testament affirms with a clearness previously unknown the immortality of the soul and the future gift of that spiritual body which shall in some way spring from the natural body as the plant grows from the seed. There had grown up, no doubt quite naturally, anticipations of this doctrine and ever stronger and more deeply-rooted persuasion that it must be true. But it is revealed in the New Testament as it is taught nowhere else, and it is sealed by the Resurrection of our Lord, ever since then the historical centre of the Christian Faith. How exactly it harmonises with the teaching of the spiritual faculty I have pointed out before.

And, lastly, the New Testament not only tells us what never was told before of man's nature as a spiritual being and of his destiny hereafter; it tells also what was never told elsewhere of the nature of God and of the relations between Him and His creature man. The unity and spirituality of the Godhead so strenuously insisted on in the Old Testament, is no less insisted on in the New. But the mysterious complexity embraced within that unity, though darkly hinted at in the older teaching, is nowhere clearly set forth, but in the latter. We may find anticipations of the teaching of St. Paul and St. John, and of our Lord Himself as recorded by St. John, in the Book of Proverbs, in the Prophets, in the Rabbinical writers between the Prophets and the New Testament, and we can see in Philo to what this finally came unaided by Revelation. But the Christian teaching on our Lord's nature and on the Incarnation is distinct from all this. And it is in the Christian form, and only in that form, that the doctrine has satisfied the spiritual needs of the great mass of believers.

Now there cannot be any doubt that the hold which this teaching has had upon mankind has depended entirely on the extraordinary degree in which the teaching of the Bible has satisfied the conscience. Without that no miracles however overwhelmingly attested, no external evidence of whatever kind, could have compelled intellects of the highest rank, side by side with the most uncultivated and the most barren, to accept it as divine, nor could anything else have so often rekindled its old fire at times when faith in it had apparently withered away. The teaching of the Bible has always found and must always find its main evidence within the human soul.

And the fact that the teaching of the Bible, though when examined afterwards it turns out to be development or evolution, yet was always given at the time as a revelation, so far from diminishing the force of this internal evidence adds to it still more force than it would otherwise have. For what underlies the very conception of revelation is the doctrine that all progress in higher spiritual knowledge is bound up with conscious communion with God. Now it is an experience common to all believers that in that communion is to be found not only all strength but all enlightenment also. The believer knows that he learns spiritual truth in proportion as he refers his life to God's judgment, prays to God for clearer vision of what is duty and what is right faith, and makes it his one great aim to do God's will. He uses all the faculties that God has given him to understand the great divine law; but he perpetually looks to God for instruction, and whatever else may be said of that instruction his experience tells him that his advance in spiritual knowledge is in proportion to his nearness in thought and feeling to God Himself. That the progress of the human race in spiritual knowledge, unlike progress in scientific knowledge, should be due not to thinkers intellectually gifted, but to Prophets and Apostles inspired by God, thus exactly corresponds with what the spiritually-minded man finds within his own soul. And so too does it correspond with what he sees in others. Often and often the unlearned and untrained by sheer goodness of life attain to wonderful perception of spiritual truth, and the holiness of the unlettered peasant reveals to his conscience the law of right conduct in circumstances which perplex the disciplined and well informed. As the human race has learnt the highest spiritual truth by direct communication from God, so too on communion with God far more than on intellectual power, depends the progress of spiritual knowledge in every human soul.

But though the hold of the Bible on the faith of believers unquestionably depends on its satisfying the conscience in every stage of its enlightenment, it is equally certain that those who gave the messages recorded in the Bible claimed something more as proof of their authority than the approval of the conscience of their hearers. They professed to prove their mission by the evidence of supernatural powers; and the teaching of the Bible cannot be dissociated from the miraculous element in it which is connected with that teaching. If, indeed, the Old Testament stood alone we might acknowledge that the miraculous element in it occupied comparatively so small a place, and was so separable from the rest, and the evidence for it was so rarely, if ever, contemporaneous, that it might be left out of count. But we cannot say this of the New Testament, nor in particular of the account that has reached us of the sayings and doings of our Lord. The miracles are embedded in, are indeed intertwined with, the narrative. Many of our Lord's most characteristic sayings are so associated with narratives of miracles that the two cannot be torn apart: 'I have not seen so great faith, no, not in Israel;' 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work;' 'Son, thy sins be forgiven thee;' 'Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees;' 'It is not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to dogs;' 'This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting;' 'Were there not ten cleansed, but where are the nine?' 'Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.' In fact, there can be no real doubt that our Lord believed that He could work miracles, and professed to work them, and that His disciples believed that He worked many, and included that fact in their meaning when they spoke of Him as going about doing good. And these disciples professed to work miracles themselves and believed that they did work them. It is of course true that they had no strictly scientific conception of a miracle, and would often have called by that name what was in reality extraordinary but not miraculous. And it is true too that, if we take each miracle by itself, there is but one miracle, namely our Lord's Resurrection, for which clear and unmistakeable and sufficient evidence is given. But while the exclusion of any one miracle as insufficiently attested is possible, the exclusion of the miraculous element altogether is not possible without a complete surrender of the position taken by the first Christian teachers. As they claimed to be inspired and to have enlightenment which was not shared by mankind at large, so did they claim, if not each for himself, yet certainly for our Lord, power not shared by ordinary men, power to step out of the ordinary course of natural events, and, whether by virtue of some higher law operative only in rare instances, or by direct interference of the Almighty, to prove a divine mission by exhibiting in fact what is an essential part of the supremacy of the Moral Law, the dominion of that Law over the physical world.

The teachers of other religions besides the Christian have claimed supernatural powers, and have professed to give a supernatural message. This is a strong evidence of the deep-seated need in the human soul for such a direct communication from God to man. Men seem to need it so much that without it they are unable to accept the truth, or to hold it long if they do accept it. All who thus claim supernatural authority must, of course, justify their claim. They must justify their message to the human conscience. What they teach must be an advance towards, and finally an expression of, the Supreme Moral Law. And if they profess to have miraculous power they must give reasonable evidence that such power is really theirs. But if they fail in this, still the fact remains that their very claim must answer to something in the spiritual nature of man, or it would not be so invariably made nor so largely successful.

It seems as if, whatever may be the ground of belief when once revelation has penetrated into the soul, the exercise of supernatural power was needed to procure that access in the first instance. We believe because we find our consciences satisfied, and we bring up our children in such discipline of conscience that they too shall have sufficient training to recognise and hold fast divine truth. And if we had lived at the time and could have had our eyes opened to see the spiritual power of the Christian Faith, we might have believed without any external evidence at all. But the first receivers of the message, to whom the revelation was new, and, as must have often happened and we actually know did happen, to whom it was hard to reconcile that revelation with previous teaching, how sure were they to need some other and outer evidence that it really came from God. The supernatural in the form of miracles can never be the highest kind of evidence, can never stand alone as evidence; but it seems to have been needed for the first reception. And there seem to be minds that need it still, and to all it is a help to find that reasonable ground can be shown for holding that such evidence was originally given.

Revelation, in short, takes a higher stand than belongs to all other teaching, and except for its having taken that higher stand it does not appear that the highest teaching would have been possible. To look back afterwards and say that we find a development or an evolution is easy. And at first sight it seems to follow that, being an evolution, it may well be no more than the outcome of the working of the natural forces. But look closer and you see the undeniable fact that all these developments by the working of natural forces have perished. Not Socrates, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor the Stoics, nor Philo have been able to lay hold of mankind, nor have their moral systems in any large degree satisfied our spiritual faculty. Revelation, and revelation alone, has taught us; and it is from the teaching of revelation that men have obtained the very knowledge which some now use to show that there was no need of revelation. That altruism which is now to displace the command of God is nothing but the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount robbed of its heavenly power, robbed of the great doctrine which underlies the whole sermon. For that doctrine is the Fatherhood of God which has been shown most especially in this, that from the beginning He has never forgotten His children.

LECTURE VI.

APPARENT COLLISION BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION.

Evolution examined. The formation of the habitable world. The formation of the creatures which inhabit it. Transmission of characteristics. Variations perpetually introduced. Natural selection. On the other side, life not yet accounted for by Evolution. Cause of variations not yet examined. Moral Law incapable of being evolved. Account given in Genesis not at variance with doctrine of Evolution. Evolution of man not inconsistent with dignity of humanity.

LECTURE VI.

APPARENT COLLISION BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION.

'Know ye that the Lord He is God: it is He that hath made us, and
not we ourselves.' _Psalm_ c. 3.

Religion is rooted in our spiritual nature and its fundamental truths are as independent of experience for their hold on our consciences as the truths of mathematics for their hold on our reason.

But as a matter of fact Religion has taken the form of a revelation. And this introduces a new contact between Religion and Science, and of necessity a new possibility of collision. There is not only possible opposition or apparent opposition of Science in what is revealed, in what we may call the actual substance of the revelation; but also in the accessories and evidences of the revelation, which may be no actual part of the revelation itself, but nevertheless are, to all appearance, inseparably bound up with it. It is therefore no more than might have been expected that the general postulate of the uniformity of nature should appear to be contravened by the claim to supernatural power made on behalf of revelation, and that the special, but just at present leading scientific doctrine, the doctrine of Evolution, should be found inconsistent with parts, or what appear to be parts, of the revelation itself. And we have to consider the two questions, What has Revelation to say concerning Evolution? and what has Science to say concerning Miracles?

Concerning Evolution, we have first to consider how much in this direction has been made fairly probable, and what still remains to be determined.

It cannot then be well denied that the astronomers and geologists have made it exceedingly probable that this earth on which we live has been brought to its present condition by passing through a succession of changes from an original state of great heat and fluidity, perhaps even from a mixture mainly consisting of gases; that such a body as the planet Jupiter represents one of the stages through which it has passed, that such a body as the moon represents a stage toward which it is tending; that it has shrunk as it cooled, and as it shrank has formed the elevations which we call mountains, and the depressions which contain the seas and oceans; that it has been worn by the action of heat from within and water from without, and in consequence of this action presents the appearance when examined below the surface of successive strata or layers; that different kinds of animal and vegetable life have followed one another on the surface, and that some of their remains are found in these strata now; and that all this has taken enormous periods of time. All this is exceedingly probable, because it is the way in which, as Laplace first pointed out, under well-established scientific laws of matter, particularly the law of gravitation and the law of the radiation of heat, a great fluid mass would necessarily change. And the whole solar system may and probably did come into its present condition in this way. It certainly could have been so formed, and there is no reason for supposing that it was formed in any other way.

Once more, if we begin, as it were, at the other end, and trace things backwards from the present, instead of forwards from the remote past, it cannot be denied that Darwin's investigations have made it exceedingly probable that the vast variety of plants and animals have sprung from a much smaller number of original forms.

In the first place, the unity of plan which can be found pervading any great class of animals or plants seems to point to unity of ancestry. Why, for instance, should the vertebrate animals be formed on a common plan, the parts of the framework being varied from species to species, but the framework as a whole always exhibiting the same fundamental type? If they all descended from a common ancestor, and the variations were introduced in the course of that descent, this remarkable fact is at once accounted for. But, in the second place, observation shows that slight variations ARE perpetually being introduced with every successive generation, and many of these variations are transmitted to the generations that follow. In the course of time, therefore, from any one parent stock would descend a very large variety of kinds. But if, in the third place, it be asked why this variety does not range by imperceptible degrees from extreme forms in one direction to extreme forms in the other, the answer is to be found in the enormous prodigality and the equally enormous waste of life and living creatures. Plants and animals produce far more descendants than ever come even to such maturity as to reproduce their kind. And this is particularly the case with the lower forms of life. Eggs and seeds and germs are destroyed by millions, and so in a less but still enormous proportion are the young that come from those that have not been destroyed. There is no waste like the waste of life that is to be seen in nature. Living creatures are destroyed by lack of fit nourishment, by lack of means of reproduction, by accidents, by enemies. The inevitable operation of this waste, as Darwin's investigation showed, has been to destroy all those varieties which were not well fitted to their surroundings, and to keep those that were. One species of animal has been preserved by length of neck, which enabled it to reach high-growing fruits and leaves; another by a thicker skin, which made it difficult for enemies to devour; another by a colour which made it easier to hide. One plant has been preserved by a bright flower which attracted insects to carry its pollen to other flowers of its kind; another by a sweet fruit which attracted birds to scatter its seed. Meanwhile other animals and plants that had not these advantages perished for the lack of them. The result would be to maintain, and perpetually, though with exceeding slowness, more and more to adapt to the conditions of their life, those species whose peculiarities gave them some advantage in the great struggle for existence.

Here again we have the working of known laws of life, capable of accounting for what we see. And the high probability cannot be denied that by evolution of this kind the present races of living creatures have been formed. And to these arguments the strongest corroboration is given by the frequent occurrence, both in plants and animals, of useless parts which still remain as indications of organs that once were useful and have long become useless. Animals that now live permanently in the dark have abortive eyes which cannot see, but indicate an ancestor with eyes that could see. Animals that never walk have abortive legs hidden under their skin, useless now but indicating what was useful once. Our knowledge no doubt in this as in any other province of nature is but the merest fraction of what may be known therein. But there is no evidence whatever to show that what we have observed is not a fair sample of the whole. And so taking it, we find that the mass of evidence in favour of the evolution of plants and animals is enormously great and increasing daily.

Granting then the high probability of the two theories of Evolution, that which begins with Laplace and explains the way in which the earth was fitted to be the habitation of living creatures, and that which owes its name to Darwin and gives an account of the formation of the living creatures now existing, we have to see what limitations and modifications are necessarily attached to our complete acceptance of both.

First, then, at the very meeting point of these two evolutions we have the important fact that all the evidence that we possess up to the present day negatives the opinion that life is a mere evolution from inorganic matter. We know perfectly well the constituents of all living substances. We know that the fundamental material of all plants and all animals is a compound called protoplasm, or that, in other words, organic matter in all its immense variety of forms is nothing but protoplasm variously modified. And we know the constituent elements of this protoplasm, and their proportions, and the temperatures within which protoplasm as such can exist. But we are quite powerless to make it, or to show how it is made, or to detect nature in the act of making it. All the evidence we have points to one conclusion only, that life is the result of antecedent life, and is producible on no other conditions. Repeatedly have scientific observers believed that they have come on instances of spontaneous generation, but further examination has invariably shown that they have been mistaken. We can put the necessary elements together, but we cannot supply the necessary bond by which they are to be made to live. Nay, we cannot even recall that bond when it has once been dissolved. We can take living protoplasm and we can kill it. It will be protoplasm still, so far as our best chemistry can discover, but it will be dead protoplasm, and we cannot make it live again; and as far as we know nature can no more make it live than we can. It can be used as food for living creatures, animals or plants, and so its substance can be taken up by living protoplasm and made to share in the life which thus consumes it; but life of its own it cannot obtain. Now here, as it seems, the acceptance of the two evolutions lands us in acceptance of a miracle. The creation of life is unaccounted for. And it much more exactly answers to what we mean by a miracle than it did under the old theory of creation before Evolution was made a scientific doctrine. For under that old theory the creation of living creatures stood on the same footing as the creation of metals or other inorganic substances. It was part of that beginning which had to be taken for granted, and which for that reason lay outside of the domain of Science altogether. But if we accept the two evolutions, the creation of life, if unaccounted for, presents itself as a direct interference in the actual history of the world. There could have been no life when the earth was nothing but a mass of intensely heated fluid. There came a time when the earth became ready for life to exist upon it. And the life came, and no laws of inorganic matter can account for its coming. As it stands this is a great miracle. And from this conclusion the only escape that has been suggested is to suppose that life came in on a meteoric stone from some already formed habitable world; a supposition which transfers the miracle to another scene, but leaves it as great a miracle as before.

Nor, if it was a miracle, can we deny that there was a purpose in it worthy of miraculous interference. For what purpose can rank side by side with the existence and development of life, the primary condition of all moral and spiritual existence and action in this world? In the introduction of life was wrapped up all that we value and all that we venerate in the whole creation. The infinite superiority, not in degree only, but in kind, of the living to the lifeless, of a man to a stone, justifies us in believing that the main purpose of the creation that we see was to supply a dwelling-place and a scene of action for living beings. We cannot say that the dignity of the Moral Law requires that creatures to be made partakers in the knowledge of it, and even creatures of a lower nature but akin to them, must have been the results of a separate and miraculous act of creation. But we can say that there is a congruity in such a miracle, with the moral purpose of all the world, of which we are a part, that removes all difficulty in believing it. Science, as such, cannot admit a miracle, and can only say, 'Here is a puzzle yet unsolved.' Nor can the most religious scientific man be blamed as undutiful to religion if he persists in endeavouring to solve the puzzle. But he has no right to insist beforehand that the puzzle is certainly soluble; for that he cannot know, and the evidence is against him.

Secondly, if we look at the Darwinian theory by itself, we see at once that it is incomplete, and the consideration of this incompleteness gravely modifies the conclusion which would otherwise be rightly drawn from it, and which, indeed, Darwin himself seems disposed to draw. For the theory rests on two main pillars, the transmission of characteristics from progenitor to progeny, and the introduction of minute variations in the progeny with each successive generation. Now, the former of these may be said to be well established, and we recognise it as a law of life that all plants and animals propagate their own kind. But the latter has, as yet, been hardly examined at all. Each new generation shows special slight variations. But what causes these variations? and what determines what they shall be? In Darwin's investigations these questions are not touched. The variations are treated as if they were quite indefinite in number and in nature. He concerns himself only with the effect of these variations after they have appeared. Some have the effect of giving the plant or animal an advantage in the struggle of life; some give no such advantage; some are hurtful. And hence follows the permanent preservation or speedy destruction of the plants and animals themselves. But we are bound to look not only to their effects but to their causes, if the theory is to be completed. And then we cannot fail to see that these variations in the progeny cannot be due to something in the progenitors, or otherwise the variations would be all alike, which they certainly are not. They must, therefore, be due to external circumstances. These slight variations are produced by the action of the surroundings, by the food, by the temperature, by the various accidents of life in the progenitors. Now, when we see this, we see also how gravely it modifies the conclusions which we have to draw concerning the ancestry of any species now existing. Let us take, for instance, the great order of vertebrate animals. At first sight the Darwinian theory seems to indicate that all these animals are descended from one pair or one individual, and that their unity of construction is due to that fact; but if we go back in thought to the time at which the special peculiarities were introduced which really constituted the order and separated it from other animals, we see that it is by no means clear that it originated with one pair or with one individual, and that, on the contrary, the probabilities are the other way. Although the separation of this order from the rest must have taken place very early, it cannot well have taken place until millions of animals had already come into existence. The prodigality of nature in multiplying animal life is fully acknowledged by Darwin, and that prodigality is apparently greatest in the lowest and most formless type of animal. There being, then, these many millions of living creatures in existence, the external surroundings introduce into them many variations, and among these the special variations to which the vertebrate type is due. It is quite clear that wherever the external surroundings were the same or nearly the same, the variations introduced would be the same or nearly the same. Now, it is far more probable that external surroundings should be the same or nearly the same in many places than that each spot should be absolutely unlike every other spot in these particulars. The beginnings of the vertebrate order would show themselves simultaneously, or at any rate independently, in many places wherever external conditions were sufficiently similar. And the unity of the plan in the vertebrata would be due, not to absolute unity of ancestry, but to unity of external conditions at a particular epoch in the descent of life. Hence it follows that the separation of animals into orders and genera and even into species took place, if not for the most part yet very largely, at a very early period in the history of organic evolution. Of course the descendants of any one of the original vertebrata might, and probably in not a few cases did, branch off into new subdivisions and yet again into further subdivisions, and we are always justified in looking for unity of ancestry among all the species. But it is also quite possible that any species may be regularly descended, without branching off at all, from one of the originals, and that other species that resemble it may owe the resemblance simply to very great similarity of external conditions. To find, for instance, the unity of ancestry between man and the other animals, it will certainly be necessary to go back to a point in the history of life when living creatures were as yet formless, undeveloped--the materials, as we may call them, of the animal creation as we now see it, and not in any but a strictly scientific sense, what we mean when we ordinarily speak of animals. The true settlement of such questions as these can only be obtained when long and patient study shall have completed Darwin's investigations by determining under what laws and within what limits the slight variations which characterise each individual animal or plant are congenitally introduced into its structure. As things stand the probabilities certainly are that a creature with such especial characteristics as man has had a history altogether of his own, if not from the beginning of all life upon the globe, yet from a very early period in the development of that life. He resembles certain other animals very closely in the structure of his body; but the part which external conditions had to play in the earliest stages of evolution of life must have been so exceedingly large that identity or close similarity in these external conditions may well account for these resemblances. And the enormous gap which separates his nature from that of all other creatures known, indicates an exceedingly early difference of origin.

Lastly, it is quite impossible to evolve the Moral Law out of anything but itself. Attempts have been made, and many more will no doubt be made, to trace the origin of the spiritual faculty to a development of the other faculties. And it is to be expected that great success will ultimately attend the endeavours to show the growth of all the subordinate powers of the soul. That our emotions, that our impulses, that our affections should have had a history, and that their present working should be the result of that history, has nothing in it improbable. There can be no question that we inherit these things very largely, and that they are also very largely due to special peculiarities of constitution in each individual. That large part of us which is rightly assigned to our nature as distinct from our own will and our own free action, it is perfectly reasonable to find subject to laws of Evolution. Much of this nature, indeed, we share with the lower animals. They, too, can love; can be angry or pleased; can put affection above appetite; can show generosity and nobility of spirit; can be patient, persevering, tender, self-sacrificing; can take delight in society: and some can even organise it, and thus enter on a kind of civilisation. The dog and the horse, man's faithful servants and companions, show emotions and affections rising as far as mere emotions and affections can rise to the human level. Ants show an advance in the arts of life well comparable to our own. If the bare animal nature is thus capable of such high attainments by the mere working of natural forces, it is to be expected that similar forces in mankind should be found to work under similar laws. We are not spiritual beings only, we are animals, and whatever nature has done for other animals we may expect it to have done and to be doing for us. And if their nature is capable of evolution, so too should ours be. And the study of such evolution of our own nature is likely to be of the greatest value. This nature is the main instrument, put into the grasp as it were of that spiritual faculty which is our inmost essence, to be used in making our whole life an offering to God. It is good to know what can be done with this instrument and what cannot; how it has been formed in the past, and may be still further formed for the future. It is good to study the evolution of humanity. But all this does not touch the spiritual faculty itself, nor the Moral Law which that faculty proclaims to us. The essence of that law is its universality; and out of all this development, when carried to its very perfection, the conception of such universality cannot be obtained. Nothing in this evolution ever rises to the height of a law which shall bind even God Himself and enable Abraham to say, 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' The very word right in this, its fulness of meaning, cannot be used.

Evolution may lead the creature to say what is hateful and what is loveable, what is painful and what is delightful, what is to be feared and what is to be sought; it may develope the sentiment which comes nearest of all to the sentiment of reverence, namely, the sentiment of shame; but it cannot reveal the eternal character of the distinction between right and wrong. Nay, there may be, as was pointed out in the last Lecture, an evolution in our knowledge even of the Moral Law, just as there is an evolution in our knowledge of mathematics. The fulness of its meaning can become clearer and ever clearer as generation learns from generation. But the principle of the Moral Law, its universality, its supremacy, cannot come out of any development of human nature any more than the necessity of mathematical truth can so come. It stands not on experience, and is its own evidence. Nor indeed have any of the attempts to show that everything in man (religion included) is the product of Evolution ever touched the question how this conception of universal supremacy comes in. It is treated as if it were an unauthorised extension from our own experience to what lies beyond all experience. This, however, is to deny the essence of the Moral Law altogether: that Law is universal or it is nothing.

Now, when we compare the account of the creation and of man given by the doctrine of Evolution with that given in the Bible, we see at once that the two are in different regions. The purpose of giving the accounts is different; the spirit and character of the accounts is different; the details are altogether different. The comparison must take note of the difference of spirit and aim before it can proceed at all.

It is then quite certain, and even those who contend for the literal interpretation of this part of the Bible will generally admit, that the purpose of the revelation is not to teach Science at all. It is to teach great spiritual and moral lessons, and it takes the facts of nature as they appear to ordinary people. When the creation of man is mentioned there is clearly no intention to say by what processes this creation was effected, or how much time it took to work out those processes. The narrative is not touched by the question, Was this a single act done in a moment, or a process lasting through millions of years? The writer of the Book of Genesis sees the earth peopled, as we may say, by many varieties of plants and animals. He asserts that God made them all, and made them resemble each other and differ from each other. He knows nothing and says nothing of the means used to produce their resemblances or their differences. He takes them as he sees them, and speaks of their creation as God's work. Had he been commissioned to teach his people the science of the matter, he would have had to put a most serious obstacle in the way of their faith. They would have found it almost impossible to believe in a process of creation so utterly unlike all their own experience. And it would have been quite useless to them besides, since their science was not in such a condition as to enable them to coordinate this doctrine with any other. As science it would have been dead; and as spiritual truth it would have been a hindrance.

But he had, nevertheless, great ideas to communicate, and we can read them still.

He had to teach that the world as we see it, and all therein contained, was created out of nothing; and that the spiritual, and not the material, was the source of all existence. He had to teach that the creation was not merely orderly, but progressive; going from the formless to the formed; from the orderless to the ordered; from the inanimate to the animate; from the plant to the animal; from the lower animal to the higher; from the beast to the man; ending with the rest of the Sabbath, the type of the highest, the spiritual, life. Nothing, certainly, could more exactly match the doctrine of Evolution than this. It is, in fact, the same thing said from a different point of view. All this is done by casting the account into the form of a week of work with the Sabbath at the end. In so constructing his account, the writer made use of a mode of teaching used commonly enough in the Bible. The symbolical use of the number seven is common in other inspired writers. The symbolical use of periods of time is not without example. That the purpose of the account was not to teach great truths, but to give men information upon scientific questions, is incredible. And, in fact, if we look in this account for literal history, it becomes very difficult to give any meaning to what is said of the seventh day, or to reconcile the interpretation of it with our Lord's words concerning the Sabbath, 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' There is no more reason for setting aside Geology, because it does not agree in detail with Genesis, than there is for setting aside Astronomy because all through the Old Testament the sun is spoken of as going round the earth.

And when the writer of Genesis passes from creation in general to man in particular, it is still clear that he has no mission to tell those for whom he was writing by what processes man was formed, or how long those processes lasted. This was as alien from his purpose as it would have been to tell what every physiologist now knows of the processes by which every individual man is developed from a small germ to a breathing and living infant. He takes men--and he could not but take men as he sees them--with their sinful nature, with their moral and spiritual capacity, with their relations of sex, with their relations of family. He has to teach the essential supremacy of man among creatures, the subordination in position but equality in nature of woman to man, the original declension of man's will from the divine path, the dim and distant but sure hope of man's restoration. These are not, and cannot be, lessons of science. They are worked out into the allegory of the Garden of Eden. But in this allegory there is nothing whatever that crosses the path of science, nor is it for reasons of science that so many great Christian thinkers from the earliest age of the Church downwards have pronounced it an allegory. The spiritual truth contained in it is certainly the purpose for which it is told; and evolution such as science has rendered probable had done its work in forming man such as he is before the narrative begins.