The Religious Work of Science. 501 



identified personality with changefulness, and arbitrariness 

 with sudden paroxysmal acts and special interferences. 



What, then, I ask, to a thoughtful observer, would 

 be the kind of phenomena, the aspect of things and 

 events, which would look most like the signs of a per- 

 sonality and a will in Nature ? Surely these phenomena 

 and that aspect, from which the indications of anomaly 

 were most completely banished, .and throughout which, 

 from beginning to end, reigned calm and changeless 

 order, unbroken sequence and continuity, the majestic 

 presence of power and law. Even if the modern theory of 

 evolution were conclusively established; even if it were 

 proved that as surely as the germ contains virtually the 

 full-grown plant, the whole history of the material universe 

 was potentially contained in the first atom, or '* cosmic 

 vapor," and that not a single act of what was erroneously 

 designated supernatural creative power had ever been in- 

 tercalated into it, so far from excluding, this would only 

 be more profoundly consistent with the agency of an abso- 

 lutely personal intelligence. For it would be only more 

 fully significant of an intelligence in which the end was 

 ever presupposed m the beginning, and the beginning surely 

 prophetic of the end ; and all things were woven together 

 by the grand necessities of thought. 



Thus is it confessed that the inflexible order of the uni- 

 verse, as discovered and proclaimed by science, bears the 

 loftiest witness to its Divine Creator, and the revolution of 

 thought is complete. For the view long held as religious, 

 science has substituted a view that is more eminently re- 

 ligious. Shall we deny, then, that those who are deepening 

 and widening our conceptions of the realm of natural truth, 

 are doing an essentially religious work ? And may it not 

 be that the constructors of the philosophy of evolution 

 are entitled to a leading place among the evangelists of 

 our time ? 



