324 Evolution as Related to Heligious Thought. 



" Origin of Species " Darwin explicitly places an intelligent 

 Creator at the beginning of the process of organic evolu- 

 tion. We wish to know if he is rightly there ; if his being 

 there is consistent with Darwin's general system. A nega- 

 tive answer to these questions has been very generally 

 given by those best qualified to judge the matter. " The 

 Creator, in the * Origin of Species/ " one has said, " seems 

 introduced more for ornament than for any serious work he 

 has to do, or at least rather to conciliate the mass of hostile 

 theological prejudices certain to be aroused by the other 

 doctrines than to satisfy any logical demands of the sys- 

 tem." I put in a demurrer here. Such was the intellect- 

 ual honesty of Darwin that it is not conceivable that the 

 Creator, at the beginning of the process of Evolution, in 

 the closing paragraph of the " Origin of Species," was any 

 cake to Cerberus. It was a survival in culture, a relic of 

 the mechanical English tradition which is so conspicuous 

 in the theological speculations of John Stuart Mill. But it 

 is true that the Creator of Darwin's closing paragraph, 

 which caused the widowed heart of orthodoxy to leap for 

 joy, has nothing to do at the beginning save to endow one 

 or two primordial forms with the lowest degree of elemen- 

 tary life, leaving the rest to natural selection and the ordeal 

 of battle. And he has had nothing to do ever since (on 

 the earth at least) but sit passively by and watch a law 

 which executes itself without any need of interference on 

 his part. "He is a monarch that reigns but does not 

 govern." 



However satisfactory such a God as this may be to a 

 word-mongering Orthodoxy, it can hardly be satisfactory at 

 this stage of human progress to any thoughtful, much less 

 to any religious person. We must have more of God than 

 such a scheme allows, or less will be preferred. Only by 

 not thinking much about it could Darwin have obtruded 

 such a foreign element into the structure of his thought. 

 That he did not think much about it is evident from the 

 Biography. He was too intent upon the immediate task in 

 hand to concern himself much with its relations to a gen- 

 eral scheme of thought. A mechanical Creator, " impress- 

 ing laws on matter, breathing life with its several powers 

 into a few forms or into one " (these phrases are his own), 

 is as repulsive to our purest science and philosophy as a 

 mechanical Creator engaged in the special creation of vari- 



