DARWINISM AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH. 



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entific specialist will blandly put aside religion, because lie can 

 not without trouble relate it with what he can touch and taste 

 and handle. To relate truths which belong to different orders 

 plainly requires a greater effort than to relate those which belong 

 to the same. Yet if the effort be not made, the predominant study 

 may still advance, but at a real, perhaps a fatal, cost. The atrophy 

 of faith is commoner than atrophy elsewhere. For men have come 

 to think that while they must devote a lifetime to science, or phi- 

 losophy, or art, or literature, they can pick up their religion as 

 they go. And the result is, that religion becomes like a tender 

 exotic in their lives, and in their struggle for existence " the thorns 

 spring up and choke it." Agnosticism is often an ex ijost facto, 

 though honest, justification in theory for a religious atrophy 

 which has already taken place in fact, just as men deceive them- 

 selves and appeal to " other-worldliness " to cover the neglect of 

 daily duties. Christianity makes faith the Christian's work. It 

 knows no short cut to spiritual truth, only the royal road of indi- 

 vidual search and personal effort. But there are agnostics like 

 Darwin, and there are agnostics whose agnosticism is a thin dis- 

 guise for plump self-satisfaction. There are evolutionists like 

 Darwin, who can not see their way to Christ ; there are also evo- 

 lutionists like the great American botanist, just dead, who speaks 

 of himself as — 



One who is scientifically, and in his own fashion, a Darwinian, philosophically 

 a convinced theist, and religiously an accepter of the " Creed commonly called tho 

 Nicene " as the expression of the Christian faith. 



POSTSCRIPT. 



Among the many difficulties which in the preceding articles 

 we have not touched, there are two which will probably be pres- 

 ent to the minds of many. Without attempting to discuss them, 

 we may state them, and suggest the lines on which, as it seems to 

 us, they should be dealt with. 



1. It may be said, " Then you are prepared to give up Genesis ? " 

 To which it may be answered, " Yes," if by " giving up Genesis " 

 you mean refusing to claim for it what it never claims for itself — 

 that it is a prophetic anticipation of nineteenth-century science, 

 and a revealed short cut to Darwinism. We can not sympathize 

 with those " reconcilers " who would read between the lines of the 

 Mosaic history a meaning which, if had been stated in plain words, 

 would have put an infinitely greater strain on the faith of those 

 for whom it was written than even its verbal accuracy would put 

 on ours in the present day. 



3. Then, it may be asked, " How about the fall ? Is that an 

 allegory, or a metaphorical name for a step forward in evolu- 

 tion ? " We answer briefly : The fall implies a change, and a 



