THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 19 



good- will should fail, and they be dragged along their path 

 by force, instead of following with genial submission. 



IX 



With such views regarding man's relation to the universe 

 it is not difficult to combine what I have called ' the 

 noble humanities secured for us by Christianity.' Nor is 

 it necessary to abandon the sense of allegiance to and 

 dependence on a Supreme Being, which hitherto has con- 

 stituted the mainspring of religion. The idea of God, 

 attenuated from its rudimentary gross forms through poly- 

 theism of many sorts and monotheism of several degrees of 

 crudity, has recently become a highly rarefied metaphysical 

 conception of divine personality. This process of gradual 

 attenuation, which has reduced the Christian pantheon with 

 startling rapidity to an almost diaphanous residuum of 

 abstract theism, justifies to some extent the assumption that 

 we have reached the vanishing-point of theology altogether. 

 Certainly, theology, considered as a science, can never be so 

 substantial, can never deal with notions and definitions so 

 precise, as in the previous anthropomorphic stages. But a 

 cautious speculator may well pause to consider whether the 

 old impulse of mankind toward theolatry or God-service be 

 not entering upon a new, more spiritual, no less vital, phase 

 of its activity ; whether the idea of God, instead of vanishing 

 or being dissipated, or yielding, as some surmise, to the 

 paramount idea of Humanity, is not about to assume fresh 

 actuality in correspondence with our scientific knowledge of 

 the universe and with our enlarged notions regarding the 

 wants and demands of man considered as a social being. 



A retrospective glance over the development of Christianity 

 may be useful here, since theism, in any coming stage of 

 development, must resume what is residual and still living in 

 the Christian faith. 



Primitive Christianity fused the Jewish conception of God 

 as Jehovah with the Greek philosophical conception of God 

 as Law ; these being the two grand monotheistic ideas then 



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