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I luring the last fifty years several sciences have progressed 

 towards truth, and led religion in the same direction. 



The doctrine of Evolution has widened men's outlook on the 

 world. It has cleared away many misconceptions. Now we 

 understand why reason in animals resembles reason in man; 

 why many animals come to have the elements of conscience ; 

 why the offspring of men and animals, in early stages of life, 

 before birth, are so exactly alike. We come to look on man as 

 the crown of creation, on Christ as the topmost stone. We see 

 why our Lord so often appealed to lower forms of life to 

 illustrate spiritual truth. Darwin, far from destroying faith, 

 has widened and ennobled it. He has taught us that men lived 

 possibly millions, not thousands, of years before Christ came ; 

 that God revealed himself before Judaism or Christianity to 

 man ; that Christ's religion does not stand alone, but is rather 

 the highest peak among the lower summits of religious faith. 

 It may be true that Darwinism was degraded as an instrument 

 to destroy Christianity, as in the case of Nietzsche, but that is 

 not the fault of Darwin, any more than our Lord can be charged 

 with the burning of so-called heretics at the stake. Darwin 

 did not say, nor believe, as Nietzsche implied, that natural 

 selection was the only instrument of nature in evolving higher 

 forms — he said exactly the opposite ; nor did he, like Nietzsche, 

 leave out everything except the material in forming a concep- 

 tion of higher types of men. He merely pointed out some 

 methods apparent in Nature by which Deity develops things 

 upwards, from the lower to the higher. 



The higher criticism has also done much to eliminate error, 

 and guide men to the truth contained in Holy Scripture ; 

 although, as is quite natural, in some of the developments of 

 that science, serious and dangerous mistakes may have been 

 made. But as one would not undervalue the glorious heritage 

 of French liberty, because of the horrors of the Eevolution, so 

 we must not allow sane critics to suffer for the sins of 

 unbalanced forerunners or contemporaries. 



Criticism is saving us from the idolatry of text worship, an 

 idolatry as dangerous to spiritual life as the worship of the 

 golden calf. Men are now beginning to see that the Church of 

 England was wise when she declared that Holy Scripture 

 contains all things necessary to salvation, leaving it to be 

 implied that it contains other things as well. Now we dis- 

 tinguish between the human and possibly erroneous medium in 

 which Divine truth is contained, and the pearl of truth itself. 

 We are content to believe that historically and scientifically the 



