12 EVOLUTION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY. 



No one who has ever paid the least attention 

 to the vast changes in religious thought in 

 England during the last twenty years, owing 

 chiefly to the progress and wide dissemination 

 of enlarged scientific truth (as true a revelation 

 from God to the present age, as any religion 

 has been to those which have preceded it) can 

 doubt the great influence exerted by Science on 

 Theology. Again, according to that law of 

 instability, which is inseparable from the existing 

 order of nature, all religious systems are con- 

 tinually undergoing disintegration and schism. 

 Keligion itself remains, for it is a part of the 

 spiritual nature of man ; but Theology, which is 

 its varying mode of expression, changes from 

 day to day ; and it may now almost be said, 

 that Materialism and Spiritualism* are fighting 

 hand to hand over the prostrate forms of 

 their common enemies, the orthodoxies of the 

 past. 



Eeligion and Science are the two great engines 

 of human progress, each of which is deprived 

 of half its legitimate influence if separated from 

 the other, and we have only to wait for their 



* I use this word here in its broad philosophical sense as the anti- 

 'hesis to materialism. 



