INEVITABLE 7 



to a supposed impossibility of reconciling its contents 

 with the evolutionary hypothesis. I beHeve that an im- 

 portant reason for this appearance of contradiction is a 

 mistaken conception of the doctrine in question, and I 

 am moved to do what I can to correct this conception. 



Again, as you no doubt are aware, the scientific 

 world has this year been celebrating the centennial of 

 the birth of Charles Darwin and the fiftieth anniversary 

 of the publication of his Origin of Species, the book 

 which first secured for the evolutionary hypothesis a 

 recognized place in scientific thought. It appears, 

 therefore, a suitable time to reconsider this theory and 

 its bearings, so far as it has any, on Christian doctrine. 

 There is the more reason for undertaking such recon- 

 sideration in view of a rather important modification 

 of the Darwinian hypothesis which has been thought 

 by some scientists to be required by the results of 

 recent biological investigation.* 



After a brief survey of the chief causes and forms of 

 opposition to Christian doctrine that are in evidence 

 at the present time, I shall devote the rest of this lecture 

 to a consideration of the aims, methods, and limita- 

 tions of sciences in general, and of physical sciences in 

 particular, and to an effort to define the attitude to- 

 wards scientific conclusions which Christian believers 

 and theologians ought to adopt. The next two lec- 

 tures will be concerned with the evolutionary theory — 



1 The allusion is to the investigations of de Vries and others, and 

 to the mutations theory which is based upon them. See Lee. ii, 

 Pt. IV, below. 



