488 Darwinism and Religious Thought 



depth of the passionate age before it, with the theological tone it was 

 to need. In spite of the austere magnificence of his devotion, he 

 gives to smaller souls a dangerous lead. The rigidity of Scripture 

 exegesis belonged to this stately but imperfectly sensitive mode of 

 thought. It passed away with the influence of the older rationalists 

 whose precise denials matched the precise and limited affirmations 

 of the static orthodoxy. 



I shall, then, leave the specially biblical aspect of the debate — 

 interesting as it is and even useful, as in Huxley's correspondence 

 with the Duke of Argyll and others in 1892 1 — in order to consider 

 without complication the permanent elements of Christian thought 

 brought into question by the teaching of evolution. 



Such permanent elements are the doctrine of God as Creator of 

 the universe, and the doctrine of man as spiritual and unique. 

 Upon both the doctrine of evolution seemed to fall with crushing 

 force. 



With regard to Man I leave out, acknowledging a grave omission, 

 the doctrine of the Fall and of Sin. And I do so because these have 

 not yet, as I believe, been adequately treated : here the fruitful 

 reaction to the stimulus of evolution is yet to come. The doctrine 

 of sin, indeed, falls principally within the scope of that discussion 

 which has followed or displaced the Darwinian ; and without it the 

 Fall cannot be usefully considered. For the question about the Fall 

 is a question not merely of origins, but of the interpretation of moral 

 facts whose moral reality must first be established. 



I confine myself therefore to Creation and the dignity of man. 

 The meaning of evolution, in the most general terms, is that 

 the differentiation of forms is not essentially separate from their 

 behaviour and use ; that if these are within the scope of study, that 

 is also ; that the world has taken the form we see by movements not 

 unlike those we now see in progress; that what may be called 

 proximate origins are continuous in the way of force and matter, 

 continuous in the way of life, with actual occurrences and actual 

 characteristics. All this has no revolutionary bearing upon the 

 question of ultimate origins. The whole is a statement about pro- 

 cess. It says nothing to metaphysicians about cause. It simply 

 brings within the scope of observation or conjecture that series of 

 changes which has given their special characters to the different 

 parts of the world we see. In particular, evolutionary science aspires 

 to the discovery of the process or order of the appearance of life 

 itself: if it were to achieve its aim it could say nothing of the 

 cause of this or indeed of the most familiar occurrences. We 

 should have become spectators or convinced historians of an event 



1 Times, 1892, passim. 



