DARWINISM AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH. 325 



purposes. Tlie chosen people traced their descent from " a Syrian 

 ready to perish." They were the " fewest of all people," and con- 

 stantly reminded of their origin. " Remember that thou wast a 

 bond-servant." " Look unto the rocks whence ye are hewn, and 

 to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged." And yet they were 

 what they were, the destined repository of the oracles of God, 

 and the religious teachers of the world. The Bible at least gives 

 no color to a view which refuses a degraded origin for man. 



But Darwinism, dealing with man, as it is bound to do, simply 

 from the side of his animal and corporeal nature, has done some- 

 thing to give man his true place in the physical universe. It has, 

 by the application of its own methods and its own tests, recog- 

 nized him as the roof and crown of all things visible. And by so 

 doing it has rendered any form of Nature-worship henceforth im- 

 possible. The highest, or the least degrading of these, was the 

 worship of the sun. When Anaxagoras ventured the speculation 

 that the great god Helios was a mass of molten metal, he was con- 

 demned as a heretic. Science has trodden in his footsteps, and we 

 know now that the sun is a very large ball of solid and gaseous 

 matter, in a state of fierce incandescence, and supported by invol- 

 untary contributions. It has been " found out," as completely as 

 the Boxley rood, when people were shown its works — 



No man [as the Duke of Argyll says] can worship a ball of fire, however big ; 

 nor can he feel grateful to it, nor love it, nor adore it, even though its beams be 

 to hira the very light of life. Neither in it, nor in the mere physical forces of 

 which it is the center, can we see anything approaching to the rank and dignity 

 of even the humblest human heart.* 



Nor can we any longer worship organic Nature. For we are 

 ourselves, if Darwinism is true, the last term in the series. If 

 man must have a visible god, he must henceforth worship himself 

 or something lower. In Genesis he is made lord of the visible 

 world, to have dominion over the fish of the sea, and the fowl of 

 the air, and every living thing that moveth upon the earth. What 

 Genesis speaks of as the will of God, Darwinism reads in Nature 

 as a fact : 



Man [says Darwin] in the rudest state in which he now exists is the most 

 dominant animal that has ever appeared on this earth. He has spread more 

 widely than any other highly organized form, and all others have yielded be- 

 fore him.t 



It is not true, then, that Darwinism degrades man, for in tracing 

 his descent it chronicles his rise from the lowest origin to the high- 

 est order of being of which science has any knowledge. 



And what about the soul ? If man, in his animal nature, was 

 evolved from lower creatures, when did God "breathe into his 



* " Unity of Nature," p. 309. I " Descent of Man," p. 48. 



