Evolution as Related to Religious Thought. 335 



than from self-conscious life to immortality. We can only- 

 say that there was a time when favorable internal and ex- 

 ternal conditions struck out the spark of life ; as further 

 on they struck out the spark of self-consciousness. Again, 

 no scientific doctrine not part and parcel of it has allied 

 itself so firmly with the doctrine of Evolution as the doc- 

 trine of the conservation of energy. But if the conserva- 

 tion of energy be indeed a law, if it was all the way through 

 the world of matter and of spirit, then somehow and some- 

 where the souls not only of the mighty ones of intellect 

 and imagination but of humble folk whose names are soon 

 forgotten upon earth are enabled to resume their conscious 

 individual life. Again, one of the most significant and im- 

 pressive aspects of the general scheme of Evolution is that 

 of correllated growth. In the development of animal 

 structures there goes along with the development of special 

 organs, parts and functions, the development of certain 

 others adapting them to changed conditions. Now in the 

 spiritual life of man there goes along with the development 

 of all that is best in his intelligence, noblest in his affec- 

 tions, grandest and sweetest in his moral life, the develop- 

 ment of the hope of an immortal life. Here is a correllated 

 growth ; and if the hope that is thus developed is not a valid 

 hope, if it is not a solemn and majestic portent of a divine 

 reality that we can trust with calm assurance, then have 

 we a radical contradiction in our moral nature, increasing 

 there with every higher thought and nobler act and purer 

 purpose of our lives. If the almost invariable concomitant 

 of the noblest living is this glorious hope, then, unless 

 nature's house is radically divided against itself, this almost 

 invariable concomitance suggests with overwhelming seri- 

 ousness that the same Power which organizes in us the 

 purest splendors of our thought and love, organizes in us 

 the hope of an immortal life in which these splendors shall 

 go shining on forever. 



The formula of Evolution is the survival of the fittest. I 

 know that by "the fittest" in this formula we are to under- 

 stand merely the fittest, i. e. the ablest, to survive. But if 

 the significance of the doctrine of organic Evolution resolves 

 itself into this identical proposition, it is a truism that was 

 hardly worth the patience of Charles Darwin's toilsome 

 years. Unless this doctrine can assure us in its widest 

 scope of the survival of the ideally fittest, the fittest to carry 



