488 Darwinism and Religious Thought 
depth of the passionate age before it, with the theological tone it was 
to need. In spite of the austere magnificence of his devotion, he 
gives to smaller souls a dangerous lead. The rigidity of Scripture 
exegesis belonged to this stately but imperfectly sensitive mode of 
thought. It passed away with the influence of the older rationalists 
whose precise denials matched the precise and limited affirmations 
of the static orthodoxy. 
I shall, then, leave the specially biblical aspect of the debate— 
interesting as it is and even useful, as in Huxley’s correspondence 
with the Duke of Argyll and others in 18921—in order to consider 
without complication the permanent elements of Christian thought 
brought into question by the teaching of evolution. 
Such permanent elements are the doctrine of God as Creator of 
the universe, and the doctrine of man as spiritual and unique. 
Upon both the doctrine of evolution seemed to fall with crushing 
force. 
With regard to Man I leave out, acknowledging a grave omission, 
the doctrine of the Fall and of Sin. And I do so because these have 
not yet, as I believe, been adequately treated: here the fruitful 
reaction to the stimulus of evolution is yet to come. The doctrine 
of sin, indeed, falls principally within the scope of that discussion 
which has followed or displaced the Darwinian; and without it the 
Fall cannot be usefully considered. For the question about the Fall 
is a question not merely of origins, but of the interpretation of moral 
facts whose moral reality must first be established. 
I confine myself therefore to Creation and the dignity of man. 
The meaning of evolution, in the most general terms, is that 
the differentiation of forms is not essentially separate from their 
behaviour and use; that if these are within the scope of study, that 
is also; that the world has taken the form we see by movements not 
unlike those we now see in progress; that what may be called 
proximate origins are continuous in the way of force and matter, 
continuous in the way of life, with actual occurrences and actual 
characteristics. All this has no revolutionary bearing upon the 
question of ultimate origins. The whole is a statement about pro- 
cess. It says nothing to metaphysicians about cause. It simply 
brings within the scope of observation or conjecture that series of 
changes which has given their special characters to the different 
parts of the world we see. In particular, evolutionary science aspires 
to the discovery of the process or order of the appearance of life 
itself: if it were to achieve its aim it could say nothing of the 
cause of this or indeed of the most familiar occurrences. We 
should have become spectators or convinced historians of an event 
1 Times, 1892, passim. 
