626 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the modern atheist as his ally. They are at least traveling both togeth- 

 er on the high-road which leads from a destructive nihilism toward a 

 constructive religion. Only the atheist has thought it his duty to go 

 back again to the beginning, and to measure industriously the same 

 ground that the Church had gone over just two thousand four hundred 

 years ago, when the great " Something is " addressed itself to man 

 through Moses in the word " I am," or Jehovah (nins, Absolute Exist- 

 ence).* 



But perhaps the pure logician may attempt another reply. Finding 

 us not in the least disconcerted by hearing, once again, the familiar 

 truth that all our faculties are limited, he may attempt to shatter our 

 serenity by an announcement of a more novel kind. He maj' say : Not 

 only is the imagery with which you clothe, represent, and conceive the 

 Self -existent merely relative and human, but — far more damning fact — 

 it is all a development. It has all grown with the growth of your race. 

 Environment and heredity have supplied you with all your forms of 

 thought. Even your " conscience is nothing more than an organized 

 body of certain psychological elements which, by long inheritance, have 

 come to inform us by way of intuitive feeling how we should act for 

 the benefit of society." ^ 



Be it so. The proof has not yet been made ov;t. But since these 

 evolution doctrines are (as Dr. Newman would say) "in the air," it is 

 more consonant to the ruling ideas which at present dominate our im- 

 agination to conceive things in this way. Indeed, to a large and increas- 

 ing number of Churchmen the evolution hypothesis appears, not only 

 profoundly interesting, but probably true. They find there nothing to 

 shake their faith, and a good deal to confirm it. Man is what he is, in 

 whatever way he may have become so. And how atheists can persuade 

 themselves that this beautiful theory of the divine method helps their 

 denial of a deity, the modern school of theologians is at a loss to under- 

 stand. For the cosmic force whom Christians worship has, from the 

 very beginning, been rei^resented to them, not as a fickle, but as a con- 

 tinuous and a law-abiding energy. " My Father worketh hitherto," said 

 Christ. " Not a sparrow falleth to the ground " without his cognizance. 

 "The very hairs of your head are all numbered." " In Him we live and 

 move and have our being." Pictorial expressions, no doubt. But what 

 words could more clearly indicate the unbroken continuity of causation 

 in nature than these texts from the Christian Scriptures ? And it is 

 surely the establishment of a continuous, as distinct from an intermit- 

 tent, agency in nature which forms the leading point of interest both 

 to science and to the Church, at the present day, as against a shallow 

 deism. If, therefore, man's imaginative and moral faculties, as we 

 know them now, are a development from former and lower — yes, even 

 from savage, from bestial, from material — antecedents, what is that to 

 us ? Of man's logical powers the self -same thing has to be said. Why, 

 1 Exodus vi. 3. ^ " Physicus," p. 31. 



