SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY 25 



and ready for life : to introduce that life, God did 

 directly step in by a creative act. This done, evo- 

 lution went to work again and carried forward the 

 process until the series of sentient beings was crowned 

 by man. Then evolution came to the end of its 

 tether again; to reach the spiritual kingdom the 

 intervention of a miraculous power was again re- 

 quired. A man can no more become a Christian 

 by his own wUl or act than the inorganic can become 

 the organic. He cannot — the thing is simply im- 

 possible ; and our author brings Scriptural texts to 

 support his position. This leads him into good 

 old-fashioned Calvinism, and good old-fashioned Cal- 

 vinism he advocates and seeks to clinch with his 

 scientific hammer. Indeed, his aim is to lend the 

 great authority of science to this all but outgrown 

 creed, and he evidently flatters himself that he has 

 established the truth of it beyond all question. 

 The reader soon perceives that the spiritual world 

 of which he is all the while talking is not the spir- 

 itual world of the rest of mankind, — the world of 

 spirit as opposed to that of matter, the world of 

 mind and consciousness of which all men are more 

 or less partakers by virtue of their humanity, — but 

 the spiritual world as interpreted by a certain Chris- 

 tian sect, a very limited and a very recent affair, of 

 which the mass of mankind have never even heard, 

 and in which the sages and prophets of antiquity 

 have no part nor lot. The curious and astonishing 

 thing about the argument is, not the bringing for- 

 ward and the insisting upon this kind of a spiritual 



