Gospel of Evolution 233 



sion must be accepted as the inferential scientific 

 description of what actually occurred in the irre- 

 coverable past, there are several reasons why it should 

 be welcome. It gives the world a new unity when we 

 recognize man as the crown of Nature, the coping- 

 stone (for the time being) of the great edifice. It gives 

 more meaning to the prolonged groaning and travail- 

 ing of creation when we see that the outcome was 

 man — in whom Nature became articulate and self- 

 conscious. There is fresh interest in the elaborateness 

 of the intricate economy of Nature when we under- 

 stand part of it at least as the foundation which has 

 rendered man possible. Moreover, there are discom- 

 fiting features in every man which become more in- 

 telligible when we recognize them as anachronisms 

 inherited from distant ancestry — still disquieting, 

 no doubt, but less perplexing parts of what is, on the 

 whole, a goodly heritage. "The web of our life," 

 Shakespeare says, "is of mingled yarn, good and ill 

 together." The evolutionist interpretation makes 

 both more understandable. 



The evolutionist view has a gospel for man, inas- 

 much as evolution has been on the whole an integra- 

 tive process, making more and more for the emergence 

 of individuality and personality. It is an encouraging 

 fact that it is an ascent, not a descent, that we have 

 behind us. There are, no doubt, retrograde possi- 

 bilities, but evolution has been on the whole in a 

 direction which man at his best has always known as 

 best. The momentum of the past is with men who will 



