xin.] THE ABSENT GOD OF A DEAD UNIVERSE. 333 



whether it includes or not the capacity of varying 

 (which is just the question in point), is nowhere 

 specified. And I think it a most important rule in 

 scriptural exegesis, to be most cautious as to limiting 

 the meaning of any term which Scripture itself has not 

 limited, lest we find ourselves putting into the teaching 

 of Scripture our own human theories or prejudices. 

 And consider, Is not man a kind ? And has not man- 

 kind varied, physically, intellectually, spiritually ? Is 

 not the Bible, from beginning to end, a history of the 

 variations of mankind, for worse or for better, from 

 their original type ? 



Let us rather look with calmness, and even with 

 hope and good will, on these new theories ; for, correct 

 or incorrect, they surely mark a tendency toward a 

 more, not a less, scriptural view of nature. Are they 

 not attempts, whether successful or unsuccessful, to 

 escape from that shallow mechanical notion of the 

 universe and its Creator which was too much in vogue 

 in the eighteenth century among divines as well as philo- 

 sophers; the theory which Goethe (to do him justice), 

 and after him Mr. Thomas Carlyle, have treated with 

 such noble scorn ; the theory, I mean, that God has 

 wound up the universe like a clock, and left it to tick 

 by itself till it runs down, never troubling Himself 

 with it, save possibly for even that was only half 

 believed by rare miraculous interferences with the 

 laws which He Himself had made ? Out of that chilling 

 dream of a dead universe ungoverned by an absent God, 

 the human mind, in Germany especially, tried during 

 the early part of this century to escape by strange 

 roads ; roads by which there was no escape, because 

 they were not laid down on the firm ground of scientific 



