The place of the church in evolution

Front matter

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REFERENCE LIBRARY OF HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

CHAPTER II. Tue Rist or ALTRUISM

Terrestrial life and its results. Decrease of material for reproduction; increased size of eggs; race-suicide. Rise of family, clan, nation. The brotherhood of man. Mutual aid vs. mutual competition. Love and good will. Rise of social institutions. Morality. Religion. Conceptions of God. Ethical vs. cosmic evolution.

Ends in life. The chief end. The individual vs. society.

Personality and faith. Contagion of personality. Personality one-sided but of supreme importance.

CHAPTER IV. Present Conpitions Increase of wealth. Growth of cities. Immigration. Partnership with Nature. Distribution of wealth. Legislation; economics. Use of leisure. Development of personality. Sin and responsibility. Science. Spiritual vs. material partnership.

CHAPTER V. CuristTIANITy ; ; ‘

The Carpenter of Nazareth. His life and death. The resurrection. The new life spreads. Its power and wisdom. Christian life the need of the age.

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER VI. Tue Cuurcu anal : 187

The Church as the body of the new life with many members. Diversity of churches and individuals. Theology and creeds. Joining the church. The Church needed to-day; its duty and message. Economic questions. The Church furnishes the spirit through which alone they can be solved. Church services, worship, and attendance. The Church as a means of salvation.

CHAPTER VII. Diverstry or Girts . § . 162 Equality vs. uniformity. Primitive conditions. Division of labor. Inequality and progress. Duties to the community: of the rich; of the wise and prudent; of the best. Importance of individuality. Mutual supplement. The distribution of spiritual power.

Life progressive and indestructible. Man and Nature. The power of a person. Education. All problems lead to morals and religion. The glory of life.

Tus little book might be called a Short Study of a Great Subject, or rather of a series of subjects. Surely nothing can be more worthy of thought and study, or of more careful, patient, and respectiul investigation, than evolution, personality, Christianity, and the Church.

The book is intended for the general reader, for the thinking man of work and business, not merely or chiefly for the specialist. It is not a metaphysical study; I wish it might be found philosophical in the sense of trying to express the meaning and value of all the facts; but it cannot claim to attempt so high an aim. It is based on a study of the history of the animal kingdom and of life. If evolution is true, it ought to be possible to write a history of the process and its progress. We study history that from a knowledge of the past we may learn to use the present and to forecast the future. If human history has a meaning _ and we can deduce great laws from our study of ix man’s experience during a few generations or millennia, an outline of the history of life through past ages should have its lessons which we may reasonably accept with a fair degree of confidence. If there has been something like steady progress along discernible lines since man’s appearance on the globe, or since far more remote times, the movement is in all probability destined to continue, and we shall do well to take heed to it. This seems to be true of progress in altruism, morals, and religion, the chief characteristics which distinguish man from the animal. They are rooted deep in the past.

In the thought of these great movements there is something broadening and elevating which lifts us above the eddies and shifting currents of our day, which widens our vision, and gives worth and dignity to life. Here, if anywhere, we catch a glimpse of “far-off divine events,” of goals and ends. We stand for a moment as on a mountain-top far above the limitations and mists of the valley of our daily plodding life. We are in a purer and fresher air. Where there is no broad vision of great events, the people perish.

The distant outlook gives hope, courage, and inspiration. Certainly our age, and every age, has

x need of these virtues. There come times of business depression when credit is limited and available money scarce, business shrinks, and opportunities become few and narrow. There is no real lack of money; but it is locked up, and every one fears to invest. This means hard times and possible or actual panic. A few leaders gain courage and begin to invest their hoarded capital. Others follow their example. Credit enlarges, production and use increase, business revives, and prosperity returns.

We seem to have been passing through a similar period of depression in religious matters. There was no sound reason for our fears and discouragement. The great facts and movements of life were radiant with hope; but we looked chiefly on the discouraging elements of our condition, the doubts and difficulties, the lions in the way. During this period the Church has suffered deeply. Some of us had hoped for great results too quickly; it was inevitable that we should be disappointed. Some seemed to expect the impossible of the Church, others little or nothing. Both extremes were unwise, and led to unjust criticism if not to fault-finding. Some of the criticism was needed and will have good results. But an age of

xi criticism is a barren age. It is time we took to heart the spirit of the best and wisest reproof, and set our faces resolutely and courageously upward, throwing aside “‘the youthful overconfidence and no less youthful discouragement of nonage. We are grown men and must play the henge

It seems to be a suitable time for any and every man who thinks that he has a reason for the faith that is in him to express these reasons courageously and as clearly as he can. There cannot be too much rational optimism. This is my chief excuse for writing this little book. If it can aid in the increase of faith and courage, of which we see cheering signs on every side, it will not have been written in vain. Any one who reads it will find an added proof that every individual is one-sided and partial in his views and life. It contains the thoughts of one biologist, together with many very excellent borrowed thoughts.

Yet one may fairly ask whether there is any better standpoint from which to judge any great force or movement than that of its relation to the progress of life, its place in the development of humanity. While we cannot well be too humble in our estimate of our attainments, we certainly can never have too high or too large a conception of the possibilities of life, or expect or demand too great things of it. Things can never make a life, but a great life can give meaning and value to the smallest things; a mere feather in the helmet of a Navarre overthrows a phalanx of armed men. What we cannot assimilate, vitalize, and infuse with our own personality is of little use to ourselves or others. We are too much cumbered and hampered by things; we need to think of and wonder at life. If it is not well worth living, if it does not “‘mean intensely and mean good,” you and I are to blame, and we may well acknowledge it and mend our ways. If we are to study life, it is well that we should study it _at its highest and best in man. For here it has gone farthest in the realization of its inexhaustible possibilities. The study of merely the lower forms can give us only a narrow and incomplete view, a torso. If we are to study human life, we should look first and foremost at its best expression in the lives of heroic souls. For these show us what we ought to become. If we are really desirous to study great souls, it would be the extreme of unwisdom, not to say insanity, to fail to give the chief place in our biological thought to him who xii spake and thought as never man before or since has spoken; who lived as never man has lived, and thus lifted all life to a higher plane of value, dignity, and realization. Here, if anywhere, is the key, as well as the goal, of all evolution.

THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH IN EVOLUTION

THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH IN EVOLUTION

CHAPTER I

STAGES OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION?

Or books on the theory of evolution there is no end; concerning the evolution of man less has been written, for the biologist has generally devoted himself to the study of lower forms. This disregard of man, who best and really only shows the tendency and direction of the process of evolution, has had an unfortunate influence on all our theories. The student has undoubtedly gained in accuracy by confining his attention to lower and simpler forms, but the loss of depth and breadth of view and of practical results bearing on our interpretation of human life has been great. We still wait for the master mind which can grasp and arrange all the facts amassed by the work of a host of patient investigators during the last halfcentury, and give them all an adequate interpretation. The real science of biology, especially in its higher range and aspect, is still in its infancy. 3

But we must not allow this fact to lead us to underestimate the value of the discoveries and results already attained.

We are interested in the line of development which leads steadily upward from the lowest and simplest forms of life directly to man. Our attention is to be focused chiefly on the central, upward-growing trunk of the genealogical tree. of the animal kingdom, disregarding the host of branches which have spread out in all directions and often have bent downward to end in stagnation or degeneration. For evolution shows degeneration and stagnation just as clearly as advance, and in a great wealth of examples. We wish to study progress, and to catch a glimpse of some of its laws. We cannot fail to notice that progressive evolution consists in the successive appearance and development of higher powers of ever widening scope and capacity. Let us fix our attention on the rise and culmination of these powers and sketch in brief outline what they are and in what order they are manifested. So brief and hasty an account must, we hope, raise far more questions than it can possibly answer; but if it leaves us only wondering at the glory of the mystery of life, it will not be without value. For

** wonder is the mother of wisdom,” and when we cease to wonder, we cease to learn.

We begin with the Protozoa, animals consisting as a rule of a single cell, a little mass of living substance or protoplasm surrounding a central body, the nucleus. The Ameeba, the most familiar example of this group, shows the beginning of all the functions or powers which we possess. It digests, breathes, moves, excretes waste material, secretes various products useful in its economy, and reproduces. It responds to stimuli, and apparently feels, and recognizes its food. When shaken from its hold and lost in a drop of water, it stretches out its processes in one direction and another, seeking some point of attachment. It seems to be aware of a feeling of discomfort and to seek to relieve it by “trial and error.” 4 The ° protozoan has developed the cell, the unit of structure of ‘all higher animals. Its appearance on the globe marked the beginning of a new era, the era of ever more complex and efficient living beings. It is the first long step in the rise and expansion of life. It has adapted itself to get and digest solid food, and hence prophesies a future of compact, tough, moving, searching, and sensitive animals,

But if it marks the beginning of a new era, it was also the end of a long, shadowy age of progress of which we know little or nothing. We believe, though we cannot prove, that it must have developed out of something far simpler; that originally it arose from what we in our blindness have called dead inert matter, that strange stuff in which the material mass of what we call the atom seems to be shriveling into points and centers of slight importance compared with the halo of forces which play around them. We have thus far searched in vain for the stages of this development of the living organism out of the inorganic, of the marvelously adaptable and **fitsome”’ protoplasm from the unresponsive and senseless material.®

Says Professor Wilson, whose work has thrown a flood of light on cell structure and activities: “ It is true that we may trace in organic nature long and finely graduated series leading upward from the lower to the higher forms, and we must believe that the wonderful adaptive manifestations of the more complex forms have been derived from simpler conditions through the progressive operation of natural causes. . . . The study of the cell has on the whole seemed to widen rather than to narrow the enormous gap that separates even the lowest forms of life from the inorganic world.” °

The Protozoa gave us single cells or little clusters. Out of such clusters arose sack-shaped individuals, the Ccelenterates, or Zodphytes, as the older naturalists called them, well represented by the Hydra of our fresh-water ponds. The wall of the sack consists of two membranes or layers of cells; the cavity is a stomach. Some of the cells have grouped themselves in a reproductive organ. Traces of muscular, nervous, and other tissues have appeared, showing possibilities of better things to come. But most of them settled early into sessile life, and they all live merely to eat and to reproduce. If we could have seen our world when it was filled with only Zoéphytes, or plantanimals, combinations of a stomach and a reproductive organ, we should probably have discovered very little to excite either admiration or hope. We would have said that life was a poor thing, hardly worth developing; we might easily have turned away in disgust.

Let us not despise the day of small things. The digestive system will furnish material for growth, and for the fuel of muscular and nervous engines. It insures the survival of the individual, while the reproductive system guarantees the continuance of the species.

Thus far whatever muscle there was had been used in the service of digestion. Locomotion was mostly for the distribution of the eggs, and was crude and comparatively ineffectual. The earliest worms changed all this. They practically introduced true muscular locomotion. They arranged their muscular tissue in two well-marked layers, one around the tubular intestine, the other with the skin forming the wall of the body. They thus framed a body composed of two parallel and concentric tubes, one within the other. The space between the inner tube, the intestine, and the outer one or the body wall, was occupied by the perivisceral cavity, in which all sorts of delicate organs could be safely and snugly packed away. It was a tough body, offering slight resistance as it pushed or writhed its way through the water, marvelously adaptable, full of possibilities. This general form appears with slight modifications in the trunk of all higher animals.

But the muscular system, furnishing rapid locomotion, was a compelling power in the body. Muscles are engines which burn up fuel under forced draft, and which produce waste. They stimulated the development of the digestive, respiratory, excretory, and circulatory systems. The muscular fibril contracts only under the stimulus of a nervous impulse, and hence the addition of new muscular fibrils demanded and stimulated the development of new nervous fibrils and of new cells m the nerve-centers or ganglia. Swifter locomotion made good sensory organs advantageous or imperative. These appeared mostly at the front end of the body; they were innervated mostly from the foremost ganglion, which, enlarged and with additions, will some day form a brain. The highest worms, the annelids, are the first to possess true visual eyes capable of forming images of external objects. They had been developed slowly out of ancestral lightperceiving organs.

We ought to be profoundly grateful to the worms. They did a marvelous work in the building of organs, and framed and shaped our bodies. Viewed in themselves they are not strikingly attractive; but when we compare them with their zoophyte ancestors, still more when we think of the possibilities which they unlocked to us, we are filled with wonder and admiration.

The worms had shaped a tough, compact, vigorous, and efficient body. Now the time was ripe for experiments with a comparatively new organ, or system, the skeleton. Three kinds of skeleton are possible: the external protective, the external locomotive, and the internal locomotive. The external protective skeleton was tried out by mollusks — snails and clams. It was not altogether new, having been produced in a crude form by many lower groups. Its advantages and disadvantages can be clearly seen in the clam. It hindered locomotion, and hence precluded progress. The clam burrowed in the mud, where food was abundant and safety sure. Little food was used as fuel by the muscles; hence there was a large balance for reproduction. They were fruitful and multiplied. Safely ensconced in the mud, they soon became completely conformed to an unchanging and permanent environment. Here in inexpressible comfort they have slumbered through the ages, and may continue to slumber as long as sea and land endure.

The development of the external locomotive skeleton led on to crabs, spiders, and insects. It favored locomotion and insured a certain amount of progress. The insect is swift, alert, keen, sensitive, adaptable. This form of skeleton brought with it the advantages and disadvantages of small size, both well illustrated by insects.

The advantages are many and great. Small size means easy concealment, rapid reproduction, short life, swift recurrence of generations, and hence still more rapid multiplication of individuals. But, because of the large ratio of radiating surface to heat-producing mass, it means cold blood and reduced power of resistance to unfavorable climatic changes. Short individual life means small accumulation of experience and intelligence, while the quick succession of generations tends to change habits into hereditary instincts. Insects could survive and hold their own in the struggle for existence, but the higher fields of mental life were closed to them. Their progress, rapid at first, soon reached an impassable limit.

The internal locomotive skeleton, represented by the backbone of higher vertebrates, had great possibilities. It meant large size, power, endurance, warm blood, long life, wide experience, high intelligence controlling impulse and instinct, and ultimate supremacy. But all these immense advantages were exceedingly slow of realization. The internal skeleton was a complex structure, hard to build. New tissues, cartilage and bone, had to be invented and slowly to push their way from the surface down into the sheath of the cartilaginous rod or notochord which was the forerunner of the backbone. Early vertebrates were anything but precocious. Fish, amphibia, and reptiles do not look as if they could ever give birth to thinking men. And yet even the fish have already solved most of the hardest problems of vertebrate development. The earliest ages of vertebrate life were times of trial and tribulation. Their career looked like a forlorn hope. It is remarkable that they ever succeeded in solving their problems and in winning success.

The vertebrate very early started out on an offensive campaign. It accepted no retired cranny in nature. It did not seek safety in the mud or in sessile life. It rarely developed heavy protective armor. Its powers of swift locomotion carried it everywhere into new and varied conditions. All this involved great danger. Of the earliest vertebrates so few have survived that it is difficult to decipher their history.

We must hasten on. The sharks had crowded the ganoid fishes into the inland seas and finally into fresh water; and these had pushed the developing amphibia ever farther toward the shores of the rising continents. Some early amphibia had given birth to reptiles. These had become completely air-breathing, and had firmly established themselves on the land. The change from aquatic to terrestrial life was a revolution indeed. The evolution of terrestrial vertebrates points ever more directly toward human structure and qualities as its only logical goal. For this reason the consideration of some of the most important results of terrestrial life must be deferred to the next chapter. We can notice only a few of them here.

A reptile living an active life in a medium which conducted heat far less rapidly than water would surely gain a higher temperature and give rise to warm-blooded descendants. The rising temperature accelerated all the chemical and physical changes in the body, especially in organs composed of the least stable material, the glands and the nerve-centers. The development and efficiency of all organs was greatly increased, especially that of the brain. The reptiles started the cortex, that wonderful center of all higher mental powers in the brain of man. But so marvelously complex an organ as the cortex could not be precocious. It developed very slowly and was late in unfolding and manifesting its powers.

Reptiles multiplied and gave birth to mammals and birds. During Mesozoic time they waxed great and possessed the earth. It looked as if no form of life would ever be able to compete with these huge, uncouth, but mail-clad, monsters. Birds sought refuge in the air; mammals in the dryer uplands, in dens and holes, or in arboreal life.

We find the first remains of mammals in Triassic rocks at the beginning of Mesozoic time. During the succeeding Jurassic and Cretaceous periods we have thus far discovered few remains to tell their history. The realization of their great possibilities was a slow and wearisome process. They could not compete directly with the larger and more powerful reptiles. Their future must have looked very dubious. Not until the next great division of paleontological history, Cenozoic time, did the superiority of their life and structure clearly manifest itself. At the beginning of Cenozoic time the great reptiles have practically disappeared. Birds have largely ceased to progress. Everywhere mammals are coming into prominence. Rodents, like squirrels and rabbits, have found refuge in holes or in trees. The herbivorous forms, now represented by cattle, deer, and sheep, are developing speed and will later gain horns. The carnivora, our bears, wolves, and cats, are developing teeth and claws, a skeleton of great lightness and toughness, and muscles of marvelous modeling and efficiency. The carnivores are the lords of creation.

But in the trees our “furry, arboreal ancestors with pointed ears” are slowly developing hand and brain. It was a long and strenuous education by which these arboreal primates were trained. They again were mainly bundles of possibilities which showed very slight probability of realization. But time wore wearily on. At last the descendant of the apes came out of the trees, and began his struggle with the carnivora and the world. Man had been born. The night of brute force and struggle was far spent; the day was at hand; at least, the dawn of the era and triumph of mind. |

Here was a change so great that it seems at first sight inexplicable by any process of evolution. We _ have seen the plant-like ccelenterate give birth to - the writhing worm and the swimming fish. The sluggish amphibian crowded out on land by stronger competitors produced the active reptile, and then swifter and more powerful mammals appeared. The world has changed from a fairyland of floating jellyfish to an arena of struggling and fighting beasts. But it is a world of brute forces. What is there in the arboreal lemur to promise anything better? His hand, pitted against the teeth and claws of the carnivora, seems a poor and futile attainment.

Says Mr. Fiske: “‘ Natural selection of physical variations might go on for a dozen eternities with- — out any other visible result than new forms of plant and beast in endless and meaningless succession. The physical variations by which man is distinguished from apes are not great. His physical relationship with the ape is closer than that between cat and dog, which belong to different families of the same order; it is more lke that between cat and leopard, or between dog and fox, different genera in the same family. But the moment we consider the minds of man and ape, the gap between the two is immeasurable. Mr. Mivart has truly said that with regard to their total value in nature, the difference between man and ape transcends the difference between ape and blade of grass. I should be disposed to go further and say that, while for zodlogical man you can hardly erect a distinct family from that of the chimpanzee and orang, on the other hand for psychological man you must erect a distinct kingdom; nay, you must even dichotomize the universe, putting man on one side and all things else on the other. How can this overwhelming contrast between psychical and physical difference be accounted for? The clue was furnished by Alfred Russel Wallace, the illustrious discoverer of natural selection. Wallace saw that along with the general development of mammalian intelligence a point must have been reached in the history of one of the primates, where variations of intelligence were more profitable to him than variations in body. From that time forth that primate’s intelligence went on by slow increments, acquiring new capacity, while his body changed but little. . . . Forthwith, for a million years or more, natural selection invested all her capital in the psychical variations of this favored primate, making little change in his body except so far as to aid in the general result; until by and by something like human intelligence of a low grade, like that of the Australian or the Andaman islander, was achieved. The genesis of humanity was by no means yet completed, but an enormous gulf had been crossed. .. . Along this human line of ascent ily there is no occasion for any further genesis of species, all future progress must continue to be not zodlogical but psychological, organic evolution gives place to civilization.” 7

Allthe powers of all higher animals were represented dimly in the Protozoa, they were gradually to find better and more complete expression in higher forms of life. In the line of progressive evolution one power after another takes the lead as the chief end of existence. The ccelenterate lived to eat and to reproduce. These functions form a round of life complete in itself; plants never get beyond a similar stage. But digestive and reproductive organs are comparatively simple and incapable of great complexity of structure. Some other organ of greater possibilities was sure to wrest the throne from these absolutely essential but simple organs.

Worms began to devote to locomotion some of the muscle which had long been used almost entirely for digestion and reproduction. This experiment resulted in the development of the animal trunk, which demanded ages. The development of the internal locomotive skeleton was still more difficult and slow. Nature, so to speak, used practically the whole of paleontological time in experimenting upon and realizing the possibilities of the muscular system; and through it of building the marvelously complex and unified body of the higher animals, in which “every part is at the same time means and end of every other part.” But slowly and surely a still higher power, demanding an organ of even far greater complexity, was arising. The power was mind, and its organ the brain. The nervous system was at first an apparatus for controlling the muscles, a means of codrdinating and unifying the action of different organs, and of steering the body. Only men, and very few men, use the brain as an organ of thought. So inconceivably complex an organ must mature exceedingly slowly.’ It was only a few hundred thousand years ago, at most, that brain and mind became: supreme in the body of the animal. Its reign has only begun. “We know not what we shall be.” | There has been a succession of three dynasties in the history of the animal body. First came the reign of digestion and reproduction, then that of muscle, finally that of mind. The higher power and organ always begins its career as the servant of the lower; later it breaks the yoke of the lower 19 from off its neck and reigns supreme. Every higher power must stimulate all the lower to their highest efficiency and development, but in strict subordination to its own ends. It reigns partly for the sake of the lower, but chiefly for its own end in a continually expanding and higher life. This truth is so evident in the history of muscle and brain that it needs no further amplification. } The succession of dynasties is strictly logical. Digestion and reproduction are absolutely essential functions requiring comparatively simple organs. Hence they mature quickly. The complex muscular system had scarcely begun its development under this dynasty, and had been used and developed in its service. But even digestion and reproduction had required sufficient muscle to start it on its grand career. Similarly the muscular system was compelled by the very laws of its structure to develop nerve-centers or ganglia and sense-organs and thus to hasten the day when brain, at first a very humble pretender, should ascend the throne. But the great possibilities and powers of the brain were linked with a complexity of structure which required slow and long development and greatly delayed its rise to supremacy. Still the evolution is not delayed unnecessarily. 20

The higher power begins to grasp at the throne before the lower and actual ruling power has showed any signs of weakness or of slackening development.