RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 273 



seems to me soundly given. Their point is correctly 

 made. And yet I hold it is so far from final, that it 

 leaves their own logic, as I said before, open to the 

 epithet of queer. We must indeed avoid the hasty 

 reasoning of the argument first proposed ; but their 

 own reasoning, it seems to me, is guilty of an over- 

 sight at least as great as that which it condemns ; 

 at least as great, if obscurer and more subtile, and 

 therefore more liable to pass unsuspected. For it is 

 not from the results of the doctrine of evolution that 

 the presupposition, the irresistible presupposition, of 

 the being of God arises ; not from its results, but 

 from its very grounds — from the logic on which 

 its conclusions are based. And this logic is not 

 peculiar to the doctrine of evolution ; it is the logic, 

 rather, of all natural history, of all experimental and 

 observational science; and biological evolution is only 

 the most striking and significant result of it. 



The logical mctJiod leading to the theory of evolu- 

 tion is what supplies the key to the argumentative 

 situation in the case ; and it is my settled conviction, 

 which I hope now to impart to you, that the agnostic 

 and pantheistic interpreters of evolution quite over- 

 look the real implications of this method. These 

 deepest implications are neither agnostic nor panthe- 

 istic, but are on the contrary strictly theistic ; and as 

 surely as the man of science relies upon his logic, so 

 surely does he commit himself, whether he realises the 



T 



