INVOLUTION. 333 



Acuities than to state a theory. The time is not ripe 

 for daring to present to our imaginations even a par- 

 tial view of what that transcendent process may have 

 been. At present we can only take our ideas of 

 growth from the growing things around us, and in 

 this analogy we have taken no account of the most 

 essential fact — the seed. Nor is it asserted, far as these 

 illustrations point in that direction, that the course 

 of Evolution has been a continuous, uninterrupted, 

 upward rise. On the whole it has certainly been a 

 rise; but whether a rise without leap or break or 

 pause, or — what is more likely — a progress in 

 rhythms, pulses, and waves, or — what is unlikely — a 

 cataclysmal ascent by steps abrupt and steep, may 

 possibly never be proved. 



There are reverent minds who ceaselessly scan the 

 fields of Nature and the books of Science in search of 

 gaps — gaps which they will fill up with God. As if 

 God lived in gaps? What view of Nature or of 

 Truth is theirs whose interest in Science is not in 

 what it can explain but in what it cannot, whose quest 

 is ignorance not knowledge, whose daily dread is that 

 the cloud may lift, and who, as darkness melts from 

 this field or from that, begin to tremble for the place 

 of His abode? What needs altering in such finely 

 jealous souls is at once their view of Nature and of 

 God. Nature is God's writing, and can only tell the 

 truth ; God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. 



If by the accumulation of irresistible evidence we 

 are driven — may not one say permitted — to accept 

 Evolution as God's method in creation, it is a mistaken 

 policy to glory in what it cannot account for. The 

 reason why men grudge to Evolution each of its fresh 



