A Bolder Theism Needed 489 



which, in respect of its cause and ultimate meaning, would be still 

 impenetrable. 



With regard to the origin of species, supposing life already 

 established, biological science has the well founded hopes and the 

 measure of success with which we are all familiar. All this has, it 

 would seem, little chance of collision with a consistent theism, a 

 doctrine which has its own difficulties unconnected with any par- 

 ticular view of order or process. But when it was stated that species 

 had arisen by processes through which new species were still being 

 made, evolutionism came into collision with a statement, traditionally 

 religious, that species were formed and fixed once for all and 

 long ago. 



What is the theological import of such a statement when it is 

 regarded as essential to belief in God ? Simply that God's activity, 

 with respect to the formation of living creatures, ceased at some 

 point in past time. 



" God rested " is made the touchstone of orthodoxy. And when, 

 under the pressure of the evidences, we found ourselves obliged to 

 acknowledge and assert the present and persistent power of God, in 

 the maintenance and in the continued formation of "types," what 

 happened was the abolition of a time-limit. We were forced only to 

 a bolder claim, to a theistic language less halting, more consistent, 

 more thorough in its own line, as well as better qualified to assimilate 

 and modify such schemes as Von Hartmann's philosophy of the 

 Unconscious a philosophy, by the way, quite intolerant of a merely 

 mechanical evolution 1 . 



Here was not the retrenchment of an extravagant assertion, but 

 the expansion of one which was faltering and inadequate. The 

 traditional statement did not need paring down so as to pass the 

 meshes of a new and exacting criticism. It was itself a net meant 

 to surround and enclose experience ; and we must increase its size 

 and close its mesh to hold newly disclosed facts of life. The world, 

 which had seemed a fixed picture or model, gained first perspective 

 and then solidity and movement. We had a glimpse of organic 

 history ; and Christian thought became more living and more assured 

 as it met the larger view of life. 



However unsatisfactory the new attitude might be to our critics, 

 to Christians the reform was positive. What was discarded was a 

 limitation, a negation. The movement was essentially conservative, 

 even actually reconstructive. For the language disused was a 

 language inconsistent with the definitions of orthodoxy ; it set 

 bounds to the infinite, and by implication withdrew from the creative 



1 See Von Hartmann's Wahrheit und Irrthum in Darwinismus. Berlin, 1875. 



