i6 QUAKER ASPECTS OF TRUTH 



untenable by Charles Darwin's Discovery, and they 

 had pinned their faith upon the doctrine of the Light 

 Within, This doctrine was certainly not shaken by 

 Darwin's great discovery. On the contrary, as we 

 shall presently see, Darwin's theory of Evolution gives us 

 the biological explanation of the Light Within, tracing 

 for us its origin and its development. 



Meaning of Evolution, 



And now let us consider what Evolution means. 

 Evolution means '' ordered change," It means that the 

 complex forms of life, the animals and plants such as 

 those we see around us, did not suddenly spring into 

 existence as now we know them by a special act of 

 creation, but were evolved from lower and simpler 

 forms of life. The earliest form of life was probably a 

 simple free swimming cell (a flagellate), so small as to 

 be invisible to the naked eye, if there had been any naked 

 eye to see it : a tiny speck of jelly-like substance (proto- 

 plasm), that lived, and moved, and divided so as to form 

 other cells Hke the parent. How this first cell came into 

 existence we do not know. Judging by analogy, how- 

 ever, it does not seem likely that it came into existence by 

 a special creation. It seems much more probable that 

 it came as the result of a combination and organisation 

 of chemical substances, under the influence of physical 

 forces, such as light, heat, electricity, radio-activity and 

 the like — conditions such as might conceivably be repro- 

 duced in the laboratory. When the earth had cooled 

 sufficiently to make it possible for life to exist, chemical 

 substances must have been full of nascent energy, and a 

 living cell may have been the result ; nor is it difficult 

 to believe that something of the sort might happen again 

 if the conditions could be reproduced. But we had best 

 confess our ignorance ; we do not know how it came. 

 This much, however, seems certain, that from this 



