AN OUTLINE OF THE THEORY. 25 
forces residing in matter then the world did not come into 
being through a divine fiat or command. As Haeckel 
says: “Every supernatural creation is completely exclud- 
ed.’ (Quoted by John Fiske in “A Century of Science,’ 
1899, p. 51.) Thomas Huxley is quite as definite: “Not 
only do I hold it to be proven that the story of the Deluge 
is a pure fiction; but I have no hesitation in affirming the 
same thing of the story of the Creation.” (“Science and 
Hebrew Tradition,’ 1896, p. 230.) Furthermore, the 
theory, by its implications, disposes summarily of the 
immortality of the soul. The belief in an immortal soul 
is termed by Haeckel as “quite excluded” by the bearing 
of evolution on the origin of man. The fall of man be- 
comes a myth, since man has not fallen from a high estate 
but has through many ages of slow development arrived 
at the use of reason and the dominion over nature; not a 
perfect man, made in the image of God, but a cousin 
to the tail-less apes, newly accustomed to walking on two 
feet, is the ancestor of our race. Without a fall of man 
there is no possibility nor even a necessity of redemption; 
our entire Christian theology would be dealing with 
shadowy abstractions, unreasonable fears and hopes, and 
purposeless strivings. The belief of the Christian is to 
the evolutionist of some value as a phenomenon in the 
history of the mind, but not the slightest intrinsic value 
is recognized in any of the doctrines of Christian faith, 
not even in the belief in a personal God. God is, accord- 
ing to Spencer, the Unknowable. Naturally, there can 
not be miracles, since all processes in nature are conceived 
as governed by laws not directed by a Divine Intelligence 
but by forces resident in nature. Hence, too, there can 
be no inspired revelation of God, since that would pre- 
sume not only the existence of a personal God but an 
intervention in natural processes of thought (miracle). 
‘ 
John Fiske wrote: The hypothesis of inspiration ‘“con- 
