SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 155 



hold fast alone to that which is verifiable, it is little more than a clever 

 rhetorical flourish. 



His argument in a nut-shell is this : There are three kingdoms — 

 the inorganic, the organic, and the spiritual — each atop of the other, 

 and carrying the same law into higher regions. There may be other 

 kingdoms, he says, higher in the scale than the spiritual, or the king- 

 dom of God, of which we as yet know nothing. But of these three 

 we do know, and with these we have to deal. The law of evolution 

 works in each one of these kingdoms up to a certain point, when there 

 is a break and miracle, or an outside power steps in. There is no pas- 

 sage from the inorganic to the organic without a miracle, and no pas- 

 sage from the natural to the spiritual without a miracle. Evolution 

 worked in the nebulous matter till the worlds were formed and ready 

 for life : to introduce that life, God did directly step in by a cre- 

 ative act. This done, evolution went to work again and carried for- 

 ward the process until the series of sentient beings was crowned by 

 man. Then evolution came to the end of its tether again ; to reach 

 the spiritual kingdom the intervention of a miraculous power was 

 again required. A man can no more become a Christian by his own 

 will or act than the inorganic can become the organic. lie can not — 

 the thing is simply impossible ; and our author brings Scriptural texts 

 to support his position. This leads him into good old-fashioned Cal- 

 vinism, and good old-fashioned Clavinism he advocates and seeks to 

 clinch with his scientific hammer. Indeed, his aim is to lend the great 

 authority of science to this all but outgrown creed, and he evidently 

 flatters himself that he has established the truth of it beyond all ques- 

 tion. The reader soon perceives that the spiritual world of which he 

 is all the while talking is not the spiritual world of the rest of man- 

 kind — the world of spirit as opposed to that of matter, the world of 

 mind and consciousness of which all men are more or less partakers by 

 virtue of their humanity — but the spiritual world as interpreted by a 

 certain Christian sect, a very limited and a very recent affair, of which 

 the mass of mankind have never even heard, and in which the sages 

 and prophets of antiquity have no part nor lot. The curious and 

 astonishing thing about the argument is, not the bringing forward 

 and the insisting upon this kind of a spiritual world, for theology has 

 long ago made us familiar with this claim, but the bringing of it for- 

 ward in the name of science and substituting it for the spiritual world 

 which science really recognizes. In following his argument one con- 

 stantly feels the ground disappearing beneath him, or before him. 

 His spiritual kingdom does not belong to the same order of fact as the 

 other two : it is not a link, or a step in a natural series, but a domain 

 by itself entirely apart from human reason or experience. In clapping 

 it on top of the physical universe in the way it has been done here, 

 and claiming that its position there is logical or scientific, is to do vio- 

 lence to common sense. Its position there is forced and arbitrary. 



