RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 515 



which matter has assumed. Or, on the other hand, Science may assert the pos- 

 sibility of going back to a far earUer condition of our material system ; may assert 

 that all the forms of matter have grown up under the action of laws and forces 

 still at work; may take as the initial state of our universe one or many enormous 

 clouds of gaseous matter, and endeavor to trace with more or less exactness how 

 these gradually formed themselves into what we see. Science has lately leaned 

 to the latter alternative. To a believer the alternative may be stated thus : We 

 all distinguish between the original creation of the material world and the his- 

 tory of it ever since. And we have, nay all men have, been accustomed to 

 assign to the original creation a great deal that Science is now disposed to assign 

 to the history. But the distinction between the original creation and the subse- 

 quent history would still remain, and forever remain, although the portion as- 

 signed to the one may be less, and that assigned to the other larger, than was 

 formerly supposed. However far back Science may be able to push its begin- 

 ning there still must be behind that beginning the original act of creation — crea- 

 tion not of matter only, but of the various kinds of matter, and of the laws gov- 

 erning all and each of those kinds, and of the distribution of this matter in 

 space. 



This application of the abstract doctrine of evolution gives it an enormous 

 and startling expansion — so enormous and so startling that the doctrine itself 

 seems absolutely new. To say that the present grows by regular law out of the 

 past is one thing; to say that it has grown out of a distant past in which as yet 

 the present forms of life upon the earth, the present vegetation, the seas and 

 islands and continents, the very planet itself, the sun and moon, were not yet 

 made — and all this also by regular law — that is quite another thing. And the 

 bearings of this new application of science deserve study. 



^ Now, it seems quite plain that this doctrine of evolution is in no sense what- 



ever antagonistic to the teachings of religion, though it may be, and that 

 we shall have to consider afterward, to the teachings of revelation. Why, 

 then, should religious men, independently of its relation to revelation, shrink 

 from it, as very many unquestionably do? The reason is that, while this doc- 

 trine leaves the truth of the existence and supremacy of God exactly where it 

 was, it cuts away, or appears to cut away, some of the main arguments for that 

 truth. 



Now, in regard to the arguments whereby we have been accustomed to 

 prove or to corroborate the existence of a Supreme Being, it is plain that, to take 

 these arguments away, or to make it impossible to use them, is not to disprove 

 or take away the truth itself. We find every day instances of men resting their 

 faith in a truth on some grounds which we know to be untenable, and we see 

 what a terrible trial it sometimes is when they find out that this is so, and know 

 not as yet on what other ground they are to take their stand. And some men 

 succumb in the trial, and lose their faith, together with the argument which has 

 hitherto supported it. But the truth still stands, in spite of the failure of some 



