548 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



The present phase of the quest may be far from the bourn to yield, hereafter 

 trustworthy evidence of the origin of man ; but, meanwhile, exaggerations and mis- 

 statements of acquired grounds ought especially to be avoided. — Longman's Mag- 

 azine. 



IS EVOLUTION GODLESS? 



This important question has sometimes been hastily or ignorantly answered 

 in the affirmative. How it is answered by a master of the subject, who accepts 

 the great truths of Christianity as fully as he does the doctrine of evolution, and 

 who can give a reason for both the scientific and the theological faith that is in 

 him, may be seen from the following abstract of Dr. Winchell's lecture on the 

 question : 



The religious nature of man has always manifested a tendency to revolt 

 against any general theory of development in the processes of the world. Such 

 doctrines have been equally opposed among the Greeks, among the religious 

 minds of the Middle Ages, and in our own times. They have never commanded 

 any general assent even among the purely scientific, until within less than a quar- 

 ter of a century. Since Charles Darwin pointed out, in 1858, the existence of 

 tendencies in the organic world which would go far to explain the means by which 

 transmutations of species may be effected, thinking minds have generally been 

 led to the belief that evolution is the method of nature, and the protests of the re- 

 ligious sentiments have not been able to stay the progress of opinion. 



These protests, it must be particularly observed, are based on the supposition 

 that a method of evolution must be a method of self-evolution. With this under- 

 standing religious opposition is inevitable and is right. The religious nature is 

 an original and ineradicable constituent of humanity, and has the same right to 

 exercise as the intellect itself. It means more. The objects toward which its ac- 

 tivities are directed must be recognized as realities. They are ultimate truths, as 

 valid as the intuitions of reason. A spontaneous evolution robs these faculties of 

 their object, and they protest. It falsifies an affirmation of the fundamental au- 

 thority of our being, and must be an impossihility. 



But such an interpretation of evolution is unnecessary. ^ It cannot be de- 

 fended. The doctrine of evolution is simply a statement of fact concerning the 

 7ntthod of the succession of events in the natural world. In affirms nothing re- 

 specting any efficient connection between the successive terms of the series. It 

 affirms nothing respecting the mode of origination of the first term of the se- 

 ries. It says nothing of beginning, but only of the mode of continuance. It is en- 

 tirely compatible with the supposition that the first term was the product of 

 immediate creation. 



But scientific writers speak of causes. They tell us that such and such mod- 

 ifications of structure are produced by such and such conditions or antecedents. 

 How is such language to be reconciled with the statement that evolution has nothing 



