VIE CHOW AND EVOLUTION. 267 



As poets the priesthood would have been justified ; their deities, 

 celestial and otherwise, with all their retinue and appliances, being 

 more or less legitimate symbols and personifications of the aspects of 

 Nature and the phases of the human soul. The priests, however, or 

 those among them who were mechanics and not poets, claimed objec- 

 tive validity for their conceptions, and tried to base upon external evi- 

 dence that which sprang from the innermost need and nature of man. 

 It is against this objective rendering of the emotions — this thrusting 

 into the region of fact and positive knowledge, of conceptions essen- 

 tially ideal and poetic — that science, consciously or unconsciously, 

 wages war. Religious feeling is as much a verity as any other part of 

 human consciousness ; and against it, on its subjective side, the waves 

 of science beat in vain. But when, manipulated by the constructive 

 imagination, mixed with imperfect or inaccurate historic data, and 

 moulded by misapplied logic, this feeling traverses our knowledge of 

 Nature, Science, as in duty bound, stands as a hostile power in its path. 

 It is against the mythologic scenery, if I may use the term, rather than 

 against the life and substance of rehgion, that Science enters her pro- 

 test. Sooner or later among thinking people, that scenery will be taken 

 for what it is worth — as an effort on the part of man to bring the 

 mystery of life and Nature within the range of his capacities ; as a 

 temporary and essentially fluxional rendering in terms of knowledge 

 of that which transcends all knowledge, and admits only of ideal ap- 

 proach. 



The signs of the times point in this direction. It is, for example, 

 the obvious aim of Mr. Matthew Arnold to protect, amid the wreck of 

 dogma, the poetic basis of religion. And it is to be remembered that 

 under the circumstances poetry may be the purest accessible truth. In 

 other influential quarters a similar spirit is at work. In a remarkable 

 article published by Prof. Knight, of St. Andrews, in the September 

 number of the Nineteenth Century^ amid other free utterances, the 

 following is to be found : 



"If matter is not eternal, its first emergence into being is a miracle beside 

 which all others dwindle into absolute insignificance. But, as has often been 

 pointed out, the process is unthinkable ; the sudden apocalypse of a material 

 world out of blank nonentity cannot be imagined;* its emergence into order 

 out of chaos when ' without form and void ' of life, is merely a foetic rendering 

 of the doctrine of its slow evolution.'''' 



These are all bold words to be spoken before the moral philosophy class 

 of a Scotch university, while those I have underlined show a remark- 

 able freedom of dealing with the sacred text. They repeat in fuller 

 language what I ventured to utter four years ago regarding the book 



' Prof. Knight will have to reckon with the English Marriage Service, one of whose 

 collects begins very naively thus : " God, who by thy mighty power hast made all 

 things of nothing." 



