AND ITS CONSEQUENCES. ] 7 



tlier about the matter, — sects and coteries of which it may 

 be justly said, that they would almost exclude God from the 

 management of his own world, if not managed and directed 

 in the way that they would have it." Now, this is surely a 

 most unfair representation of the consequences, ethical and 

 - religious, involved in the development hypothesis. It is not 

 its compatibility with belief in the existence of a First Great 

 Cause that has to be established, in order to prove it harmless ; 

 but its compatibility with certain other all-important beliefs, 

 without which simple Theism is of no moral value whatever, — 

 a belief in the immortality and responsibility of man, and in 

 the scheme of salvation by a Mediator and E-edeemer. Dis- 

 sociated from these beliefs, a belief in the existence of a God 

 is of as little ethical value as a belief in the existence of the 

 great sea-serpent. 



Let us see whether we cannot determine what the testi- 

 mony of Geology on this question of creation by development 

 really is. It is always perilous to \mder-estimate the strength 

 of an enemy j and the danger from the development hypo- 

 thesis to an ingenious order of minds, smitten with the novel 

 fascinations of physical science, has been under-estimated very 

 considerably indeed. Save by a few studious men, who to 

 the cultivation of Geology and the cognate branches add some 

 acquaintance with metaphysical science, the general corre- 

 spondence of the line of assault taken up by this new school 

 of infidelity with that occupied by the old, and the conse- 

 quent ability of the assailants to bring, not only the recently 

 forged, but also the previously employed artillery into full 

 play along its front, has not only not been marked, but even 

 not so much as suspected. And yet, in order to show that 

 there actually is such a correspondence, it can be but neces- 

 saiy to state, that the great antagonist points in the array of 

 the opposite lines are simply the law of development versus 

 the miracle of creation. The evangelistic Churches cannot, 



B 



