320 Evolution as Related to Religious Thought. 



sweep along, as it is to distinguish the waters of the Miss- 

 issippi and Missouri below their uniting place. It has 

 often been insisted that the Missouri is the continuous 

 river, the Mississippi the tributary ; that the present 

 naming has no justification in physical geography. If one 

 should contend that Ethics is the main, Religion the tribu- 

 tary stream, I think it would not be very difficult to make this 

 contention good. But those who insist that Ethics is ex- 

 haustive of Religion and is entitled to the name are pre- 

 cisely in the fix of an imaginary person who should declare 

 that so much of the united flood of the Mississippi and 

 Missouri as the Missouri furnishes should be called the 

 Mississippi and the rest should be ignored. 



You will agree with me that these are vain and fruitless 

 speculations. The positive method is the best. Religion, 

 as it now is in the world, is a flood of many waters. Into 

 it Ethics has poured its vast Missouri, man's sense of his 

 relation to the universe and its controlling powers its Miss- 

 issippi (perhaps this as the more stained and turbulent had 

 better have the other name), and man's engagement with 

 the idea of a future life its immense Ohio. Religion as it 

 is at present constituted in the world is composed, with 

 emphases that vary with its different sects and schisms, of 

 these three elements : Men's thought and feeling about God r 

 about Immortality, and about the Moral Law, and of their 

 action determined by such thought and feeling. If as I go 

 on I treat almost exclusively of the relations of doctrinal 

 evolution to the ideas of God and Immortality, it will be 

 from no comparative disrespect for Ethics, but because 

 where Dr. Janes has reaped I do not care to glean. 



The evolutionist need never have had any fear that if 

 he could establish his doctrine, if he could win for it the 

 consensus of the competent among scientists, the organized 

 religion, even the orthodoxy of the time, would find it per- 

 fectly harmless, would indeed insist that the Bible taught 

 it. How like to Emerson's 



" And, striving to be man, the worm 

 Mounts through all the spires of form," 



is the New Testament verse, " The earnest expectation of 

 the creation longeth for the manifestation of the sons of 

 God." Only it must be confessed that nobody ever sus- 

 pected any Evolutionism in this till Evolutionism had been 



