Evolution as Related to Religious Thought. 325 



cms sjDecies. Of Darwin making this concession, the high 

 gods of special providence and miracle may well declare, 

 "He has become as one of us." He differs from them only 

 in degree. He has not escaped from the region of mechan- 

 ical ideas. The God who " impresses laws on matter " and 

 breathes life with its several powers into a few forms or 

 into one, is a very near relation to the God who originates 

 species by special creation and performs the various mira- 

 cles of the New Testament. He is the same sort of God. 

 And if his appearance in the closing scene of Darwin's 

 drama of existence is not without due warrant, then Darwin 

 did no more for us than to establish the probability of nat- 

 ural selection within certain empirical limits. Within these 

 limits the probability is less for his allowance that there is 

 an outlying sphere of special creation; and beyond these 

 limits the God of special creation, special providence, an- 

 thropomorphic action, miracle, is still at large. If Darwin's 

 God, impressing laws on matter and breathing life into a 

 few forms or into one at the beginning of the process of or- 

 ganic evolution, is the true God, there is no reason why any 

 one should not be a Darwinian in his biology and a super- 

 naturalist in his theology, believing in the miraculous birth 

 of Jesus and in his resurrection from the dead. 



To this complexion must we come at length ? Is Darwin's 

 natural selection only a patch of new material on the faded 

 supernatural garment of the Deity ? It were a lame and 

 impotent conclusion. We thought we had a rule and we 

 have only an exception. And we are obliged to question 

 whether the last state of Darwin's follower is not worse 

 than the first. Special creation has been eliminated from 

 his scheme of vegetable and animal forms. In place of 

 this he has the laws of Reproduction, Inheritance, Variabil- 

 ity, Struggle for life, Natural Selection entailing diver- 

 gence of character and extinction of less improved and 

 weaker forms. These give a real explanation in place of 

 an empty name : special creation, an algebraic x, the sign 

 of ignorance, incapable of conveying any definite or indefi- 

 nite idea. Some of their details are marvelously beautiful ; 

 others are harsh and terrible. It is something to have 

 knowledge in the place of ignorance ; a real explanation in 

 the place of a mere word, big sounding, — meaning nothing. 

 But is it a sufficient compensation for the expulsion of the 

 living God from all the countless ages that have elapsed 



