22 



Samarra in Syria which produces a definite plan of the town 

 out of apparently formless heaps. 



GENERAL. 



There are two subjects which are by tacit consent supposed 

 to be excluded from the deliberations of our Club and of 

 similar institutions, namely Politics and Religion. And I 

 would not have touched on the latter to-day, except that it 

 seemed desirable to express the feeling of disapprobation, in 

 in which I believe I shall find around me many sympathizers, 

 at the official sermon preached to the British Association at 

 Cardiff last August by Canon Barnes, F.R.S. This dealt chiefly 

 with evolution, which, although he admitted it to be no more 

 than a theory, (though he elsewhere derived all life from "some 

 fundamental stuff in the universe " from which electrons, the 

 next stage, arose,) he dealt with as quite superseding any parts 

 of the Bible which seemed to be opposed to it. 



Some of his words are "Evolution was, and still is, not an 

 observed fact, but a very probable theory." "in our own 

 times the leaders of Christian thought have, with substantial 

 unanimity, accepted the conclusion that biological evolution is 

 a fact; man is descended from the lower animals." -"The time 

 has come when we must not try to evade any implications of 

 the theory of natural evolution. We must, not silently, but 

 explicitly, abandon religious dogmas which it overthrows." 



There is much of the Bible that we cannot fully understand, 

 but that seems to me no reason for supplanting these parts by 

 a theory which though apparently supported by many observed 

 facts, is absolutely unknown to us as regards its methods of 

 working. It is the fashion to-day for everyone to pick out 

 parts of the Bible which for some reason they object to, and 

 either deny or ignore them. I will not enter further into this 

 matter, but, as it caused much discussion at the time, I thought 

 it well to allude to it as a protest against its repetition here or 

 elsewhere. I do not mean by this to say that I do not believe 

 in the existence of any evolution in nature, for I think that it, 



