The Church Journal, of New York, said: "It is supreme folly to talk, as some do, about accommodating Christianity to Darwinism." He was accused of materialism, in deriving mankind, with conscience and spirit, from the physical creation, while he really traced them through the physical creation back to God, deriving all from the Uncreated Creative Life. And finally, said Dr. Hodge: "Darwinism is atheism."

Never was there a more mistaken firing upon a friend as an enemy. Perhaps there was more of it than there would have been, but for the fact that Mr. Darwin's theory was gladly caught at by a class of men hostile to religion, and always ready to lay hold of anything which they could turn to their purpose against it. These men, like Vogt and Hæckel, used Darwinism as their stalking horse, and from it leveled sneers and taunts against believers in God. For such allies Mr. Darwin had no liking, and cannot be held responsible; but their vociferations in his favor naturally excited some distrust of him among religious men.

It is not to be expected that men will always act with judicial fairness, when their profoundest feelings are excited. If a mother misses her child on a crowded steamboat, and goes into hysterics at the thought that it has possibly fallen overboard, it is not unnatural; she is not to be laughed at. The hysterics of many of the leaders of Christian opinion at the arising of Darwinism, however they evince the lack of a judicial temper, and the lack even of a well-trained historical judgment, and however much to be deplored as a foolish giving away of Christian interests to skeptical enemies, sprang from what is in itself most praiseworthy-from intense devotion to precious moral interests, and therefore to the forms of thought which the most sacred faiths and hopes were supposed to be indissolubly bound up. It could not be expected that Christian men should view with indifference the exultation of skeptics, who boasted of Darwinism as the battering ram with which they should soon demolish Christianity and faith in God. It would have been creditable to their heads, could they have recognized the new artillery as more serviceable to the friends than to the foes of Christianity, and captured it for their use at once. It is creditable to their hearts that they displayed such intensity of Christian feeling, however misdirected.

Had these theologians been better read in the history of the conflicts between scientific and religious men, they would have hesitated before undertaking to sustain a theory of creation upon the Bible, or rather upon their interpretation of the Bible, against the theory which Darwin built upon the facts of nature. Says President White, of Cornell University:

"There has never been a scientific theory framed from the use of Scriptural texts, wholly or partially, which has been made to stand. Such attempts have only subjected their authors to derision and Christianity to suspicion. From Cosmas, finding his plan of the universe in the Jewish Tabernacle, to Increase Mather, sending mastodon's bones to England as the remains of giants mentioned in Scripture; from Bellarmine, declaring that the sun cannot be the center of the universe because such an idea 'vitiates the whole Scriptural plan of salvation,' to a recent writer, declaring that an evolution theory cannot be true, because St. Paul says, 'all flesh is not the same flesh,' the result has always been the same."

He adds: "To all who are inclined to draw scientific conclusions from Biblical texts, may be commended the advice of a good old German divine of the Reformation period: 'Seeking the milk of the Word, do not press the teats of Holy Writ too hard." (The Warfare of Science, p. 146.)

Moreover, had Mr. Darwin's theological assailants been better read in their own department, they would have seen that he had most ancient and respectable theological authority for his doctrine of a derivative, rather than an immediate creation of the various forms of life. No more widely recognized theolog. ical authority is found in the first four centuries than St. Augustine, and he taught that God created organic forms by conferring on matter the power to evolve them under certain conditions. Among other sayings of St. Augustine to that effect, we find this:

"But, just as in the seed itself all things were together invis ibly, which successively came forth into a tree, so the universe itself must be thought, at the time when God created all things at once, to have had all things together, which were made in it and with it, when the day was made, not only the heaven with sun and moon and stars, but also those things which water and

earth have produced, in a way of potency and causation, before they came forth in slow succession, as they are now known to us in those works which God worketh hitherto.'

Other theologians down to the time of the Reformation might be quoted to show that the principle of a derivative way of creation, the essential principle for which Mr. Darwin stood, was recognized by the most eminent orthodox authorities. "It may indeed," as Mr. Mivart has observed, "truly be said with Roger Bacon: 'The saints never condemned many an opinion which the moderns think ought to be condemned."" It was little credit to Mr. Darwin's theological antagonists that they did not know that they were attacking a principle which had been admitted at intervals for fifteen hundred years by the great lights of the Church. The modern journalist is similarly ill-informed, when he regards the hospitality now extended by Christian thinkers to Mr. Darwin as a giving up of traditional Christian positions. It is rather a return from modern ignorance and shallowness to the wisdom which instructed Christian thought before the fall of the Roman Empire.

The conflict between Mr. Darwin and contemporary theologians is only the latest chapter in a long history of utterly needless conflicts between the teachers of physical science and the teachers of religion, in which both science and religion have been sufferers. Experience has by this time indicated the rule for common sense to observe in "approaching the border-land between mind and matter, where (says Professor Wright) most of these imaginary conflicts between religion and physical science take place." Professor LeConte, one of our ablest geologists, says of this (Religion and Science, p. 260):

"There will always be apparent conflicts between nature and Scripture, so long as our knowledge of both is imperfect. . . . But... if the question be a question in physical science, if the subject be one that is clearly revealed in nature, then without hesitation I would follow the teachings of nature, even though some Scriptural allusions to natural phenomena, by our traditional interpretation, may seem to teach differently. And I believe I honor the author of both books by doing so. But if the question be a question of moral and spiritual truth, and the teachings of Scripture are clear and unmistakable, then I

follow the divine text-book of moral and spiritual truth, in spite of some dim intimations in external nature and in my own intuitions, which seem to point to a different conclusion. And I think I honor the author of both books by so doing. Is not this reason? Is not this common sense?"

3. The remaining point named for us to consider is the ultimate verdict and result.

I. In a general view, we can only make a forecast. This is, that Mr. Darwin's principle of evolution is destined very largely to affect the world's thinking. It must, so far as it is a true interpretation of the ways of God. In theology, especially, we find a new race of thinkers springing up, of whom Dr. Newman Smyth is a specimen, who more or less boldly apply the evolu tionist philosophy to theological problems. As the ancient creeds are at some variance with evolutionary modes of thought, the result must necessarily be a reconstruction of the creedstogether, as we may anticipate, with that abatement of skepticism which should ensue upon a juster interpretation of the ways of God as declared in the Scriptures and experienced in history.

II. To speak now with special reference to the judgment passed upon Mr. Darwin's theory :

In Mr. Darwin's fundamental position, that "life, with its several powers, was originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or one," there seems to be a prevailing agreement among those who are qualified by their special studies to speak from the facts. When clergymen and others who are but laymen in such matters say that the evidence is not convincing, we are bound to give weight to a consideration which all specialists, and every man in his own profession, feel the force of, —that knowledge of a subject from the inside is clearer-sighted than knowledge of it from the outside, as through reading. The oneness of all life at its base is the accepted doctrine of the chief teachers of science.

If the jury of intelligent readers is not yet agreed, it is safe to say that the predominating opinion is that of the common parentage of all the forms of life, through the orderly operation of divine powers implanted in nature. The distinguished botanist, Dr. Asa Gray, has shown that the great chasm once sup

posed to exist between animals and plants is completely closed up by intermediate forms possessing characteristics of each. If we go back to the time when life first appeared on the earth, says Dr. John Cotton Smith, we find no clear break in the continuity of phenomena, but an ascent by the slightest gradations. If we turn to the highest form of life, as seen in man, embryology reveals, in the changes from lower to higher types through which the unborn being passes, what seems to be a brief epitome of the long ascent of human life by successive gradations from the lowest forms.

Says Sir John Lubbock, in his recent address before the British Association: "It may, I think, be regarded as well established, that just as the contents and sequence of rocks teach us the past history of the earth, so is the gradual development of the species indicated by the structure of the embryo and its developmental changes." Darwin's great assertion was that community of descent was the hidden bond between the various forms of life that naturalists were seeking. "How else," asks Sir John, "can we explain the fact that the framework of bones is so similar in the arm of a man, the wing of a bat, the fore leg of a horse, and the fin of a porpoise?" Dr. John Cotton Smith likewise observes: "When we find rudimentary organs in man which have their counterpart as useful and necessary organs in lower animals, it is difficult to doubt the transmission by heredity of these abortive organs to man," in whom they are utterly useless except as a record of his parentage.

The objections loudly proclaimed against this idea of our common parentage with lower animals subside in calm reflection that man is what he is, nothing less than man, whatever the mode of his origin. This is true of each individual, as regards the origination of his own life, and the same must be true of the species itself. The glory of man is not in his form, but in his moral and spiritual life. Though it should be made out that, as to form, we are derived from an animal adorned with a tail, and inhabiting a tree, as to life we are derived from him who imbreathed into us the life that is capable of thinking the thoughts and loving the perfections of God. As between a pile of clay and a living creature, as the material from which