490 Darwinism and Religious Thought 



rule all such processes as could be brought within the descriptions of 

 research. It ascribed fixity and finality to that " creature " in which 

 an apostle taught us to recognise the birth-struggles of an unexhausted 

 progress. It tended to banish mystery from the world we see, and 

 to confine it to a remote first age. 



In the reformed, the restored, language of religion, Creation 

 became again not a link in a rational series to complete a circle of 

 the sciences, but the mysterious and permanent relation between the 

 infinite and the finite, between the moving changes we know in part, 

 and the Power, after the fashion of that observation, unknown, which 

 is itself " unmoved all motion's source ^" 



With regard to man it is hardly necessary, even were it possible, 

 to illustrate the application of this bolder faith. Wlien the record ot 

 his high extraction fell under disj)ute, we were driven to a contempla- 

 tion of the whole of his life, rather than of a part and that part out 

 of sight. We remembered again, out of Aristotle, that the result of 

 a process interprets its beginnings. We were obliged to read the 

 title of such dignity as we may claim, in results and still more in 

 aspirations. 



Some men still measure the value of great present facts in 

 life — reason and virtue and sacrifice — by what a self-disparaged 

 reason can collect of the meaner rudiments of these noble gifts, 

 Mr Balfour has admirably displayed the discrepancy, in this view, 

 between the alleged origin and the alleged authority of reason. 

 Such an argument ought to be used not to discredit the confident 

 reason, but to illuminate and dignify its dark beginnings, and to 

 show that at every step in the long course of growth a Power was 

 at work which is not included in any term or in all the terms of the 

 series. 



I submit that the more men know of actual Christian teaching, 

 its fidelity to the past, and its sincerity in face of discovery, the more 

 certainly they will judge that the stimulus of the doctrine of evolu- 

 tion has produced in the long run vigour as well as flexibility in the 

 doctrine of Creation and of man. 



I pass from Evolution in general to Natural Selection. 



The character in religious language which I have for short called 

 mechanical was not absent in the argument from design as stated 

 before Darwin. It seemed to have reference to a world conceived as 

 fixed. It pointed, not to the plastic capacity and energy of living 

 matter, but to the fixed adaptation of this and that organ to an 

 unchanging place or function. 



1 Hymn of the Church— 



Rerum Deus tenax vigor, 

 Iminotu3 in te permauous. 



