2io Contemporary Evolution. 



affirming that one pure mental act of love of God alone, 

 or with contrition if needed, suffices for justification. 

 Tender consideration and loving sympathy are due to 

 all who reject revealed religion because they cannot see 

 how it accords with their notions of God's perfections. 

 But, unhappily, it is impossible to doubt but that there 

 are men who reject all divine worship because they 

 will submit to no being whatever, and who even pass on 

 to " hate God " with all their heart, with all their soul, 

 with all their mind, and with all their strength ; thus 

 beginning, even in this world, a hatred of their Creator 

 which may exist eternally. 



3. These considerations, as the present writer has else- 

 where * observed, cannot but bring home to the student 

 how evidently true is the saying that God's ways cannot 

 be as our ways, and how, therefore, " the action which 

 we discover immanent in the material universe may be 

 rationally taken to be from God. In that universe we 

 find an action the results of which harmonise with man's 

 reason, which is orderly, which disaccords with the action 

 of blind chance and with the ' fortuitous concourse of 

 atoms ' of Democritus ; but, at the same time, an action 

 which ever, in part and in ultimate analysis, eludes our 

 grasp, and the modes of which are different from those 

 by which we should have attempted to accomplish such 



* " Lessons from Nature," p. 374. 



