148 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to do in the premises. How is this contradiction to be explained ? 

 The explanation, as we conceive, lies here : There are two aspects of 

 the doctrine to which the reverend doctor refers one the purely relig- 

 ious, the other what we may call the historico-theological. In regard 

 to the first of these he feels, and, as we hold, is justified in feeling, 

 unbounded certainty ; in regard to the second, he does not feel so 

 certain, and yet he can not help regarding it as essential to the integ- 

 rity of the first. It is the latter to which he fears the solvent of evo- 

 lution may be, if it has not already been, applied with disintegrating 

 effect. 



Let us explain this further. The statement that we are the chil- 

 dren of God, in so far as it is an affirmation of consciousness, can only 

 mean that we feel related to the highest object or ideal that our minds 

 can frame. We may here make a new application of the poet's words : 



" 'Tis fife whereof our nerves are scant 

 O life, not death, for which we pant; 

 More life and fuller that I want." 



The "fuller life," for which we all, at one moment or another, pant, 

 is that which comes of subjection to the higher law. We feel that 

 evil in our nature bounds and hampers us on every side ; that through 

 it our lives are rendered poor and incomplete. This thirst for a higher, 

 fuller life, is as far removed as possible from mere self -worship, or any 

 kind of moral dilettanteism ; seeing that what we seek is not an addi- 

 tion to our individual forces for individual purposes, no mere higher 

 form of culture, but rather the perfecting of our nature through con- 

 scious relation with that which transcends and yet embraces it. " We 

 grow in elevation and nobleness of nature just in proportion as we 

 merge our individual life and happiness in the happiness and life of 

 others." These words of Dr. Caird's ("Scotch Sermons," page 36) 

 contain, as we think, in germ, the whole philosophy of religion. Mani- 

 festly, it is impossible to conceive that evolution, or anything else, 

 should ever destroy the forward and upward-reaching tendencies of 

 human nature, or, in other words, affect, in its religious aspect, the 

 affirmation that "we are children of God." Even those and in the 

 present day they are many who through fear of being misunder- 

 stood might refrain from using these precise words, would still be pre- 

 pared to understand in them the substantial and essentially religious 

 truth of man's dependence on and affinity with a higher unity than 

 that of his individual organism. 



It is otherwise, however, with the same affirmation in its historico- 

 theological aspect. The doctrine of evolution can only deal with facts, 

 with these it does deal. If authentic history can show that the human 

 race is descended by procreation, as Dr. Abbott says from God, in 

 the same way as the Romans claimed to have been descended from 

 iEneas and his band of Trojans, well and good ; evolution can have 



