78 REV. CHANCELLOR LIAS^ M.A., ON 



of ma7i, and that indeed in so far as they stand in essential con- 

 nection with God by divine descent" which is evident from the 

 following words, " for we are also His offspring." The theory of 

 the immanence of God as brought forward by modern theologians, 

 and notably by the able writers of some of the Liix Mundi 

 essays, goes, if this view of St. Paul's words be true, much farther. 

 It seems to me in some hands, at least, to postulate the presence 

 ■of God in every grain of sand, in order that there may be in every 

 such grain the potentiality of evolution, and that an evolution 

 which shall reach again as far as God. This theory has apparently 

 been made to fit the extreme evolution theory. If man has been 

 developed from sand, then man must have been in the sand, and 

 as man is divine, sand must be divine, this seems to be the argu- 

 ment. The theory has well been named, if I remember right, by 

 one of its advocates " Higher Pantheism," everything in God, as 

 distinguished fi'om ordinary pantheism, God in everything, and 

 like some other theories it remains to be proved. If the miraculous 

 element in God's manifestations was formerly too much insisted 

 on, and was used to explain almost everything, there is a danger 

 now that it be lost sight of. Without miracle we can have no 

 Incarnation, in the Trinitarian sense at least, and that a miracle is 

 not necessarily a " jerk " may, I think, be shown by the history of 

 the Incarnation. There is at all events yet i^oom for miracle ; 

 growth and evolution have not yet explained everything, not even 

 everything physical, still less everything moral and spiritual. 



If I may venture further to criticize, I might remark that we 

 rare apt to be somew^hat too severe on the theologians of fifty years 

 ago. Certainly thirty years ago, if not fifty, theologians with few 

 exceptions were quite conscious that there could be no opposition 

 between religion and true science. What they were afraid of was 

 not scientific investigation, but the hasty deductions and genera- 

 lizations which scientific men were making, and which were being- 

 somewhat eagerly swallowed in an undigested state by a credulous 

 and unthinking public. It must be remembered that the attitude 

 of Darwin and the rapid reception of his conclusions were some- 

 what alarming, for although Darwin concluded his Origin of 

 Species with a reference to the Creator, he afterwards wrote, 

 " I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion and used 

 tlie pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant 

 ' appeared ' by some wholly unknown process." 



