RIGHT RELA TION OF REASON TO RELIGION 269 



our ripest intelligence asserts religion and a God, 

 in that highest sense of both to which I have just 

 referred. Our power of rational insight, when it has 

 free course and comes to its own, does not stop with 

 the paralysing doctrine that Infinite Wisdom and 

 Love is a mere ideal; it declares it to be a fact — 

 nay, the only complete fact. We have no time at 

 this hour, of course, to enter into all the paths by 

 which enlightened human minds have endeavoured 

 to find God at the centre of all things ; but it will 

 suffice, for our present argument, to consider the 

 existence of God in the light of that phase in the 

 history of human reason which is most characteristic 

 of our times, — I mean in the light of evolutionary 

 doctrines. What, let us ask, is their true bearing 

 on the question whether there is really a God — not 

 some all-pervading, vaguely diffused cosmic Pan, but 

 a distinct Person, the Person supreme among all per- 

 sons, infinite in wisdom, in justice, and in love. 



I am as familiar as any of you with the cries that 

 have on every side risen, and still are rising, from the 

 camps of evolutionary science — cries that call upon 

 us either to bury our divine ideals in the vague 

 obscure of agnosticism, or else to replace Personal 

 Theism by what its advocates are fond of calling 

 Cosmic Theism, which is after all only another name 

 for pantheism. We are even told that science, with 

 its now settled principle of evolution, must hold by 



