How much is left of the old doctrines?

Front matter

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THE LORD'S PRAYER. i6mo, $i.oo.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. Belief in God 1

II. How THE Worlds were Made ... 28

II

In the preceding chapter we considered the relation of Evolution to the belief in God, showing how the old theistic arguments have been modified and strengthened by the discovery that creation is the result, not of an instantaneous fiat, but of a continuous process. Inasmuch as the changes which have taken place within the past fifty years in our theological statements have mainly resulted from the prevalence of evolutionary theories, it may be well to examine a little more fully the significance of the doctrine of Evolution. In the first chapter of John's Gospel we find a doctrine of origins whose philosophy is not yet antiquated : "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that hath been made." " Word " in the Greek is Logos ; it has a double signification : it means both thought and expression, the idea and its symbol. The Greeks, therefore, came to use Logos as primarily denoting the eternal Reason, and secondarily the utterance or manifestation of that Reason. Of course thought must exist before expression. When, therefore, we are told that in the beginning was the Word, the truth is brought before us that the universe originated in thought ; that the foundation of it all is in the eternal Reason. And this is the constant assumption of modern science. Science could not proceed a single step but for the belief that that which it is investio:atin2: is intelligible ; that it is possible to understand it ; that it is grounded upon reason ; that an intelligence, similar to our intelligence, has established the order and law which it expects to find in every process. The universe is reasonable ; it is in harmony with reason ; it can be made intelligible to reason ; it must have originated in the eternal Reason. This, I say, is the fundamental postulate of all scientific investigation ; any scientific man stultifies himself if he denies it ; it is no more possible to get away from it than it is to get away from your shadow ; and the whole mighty accumulation of scientific knowledge is one harmonious and unanimous testimony to the truth that the universe is intelligible. How it could be intelligible if it had not originated in Intelligence I defy any man to explain.

If, therefore, any one supposes that evolution has undermined the doctrine of an intelligent Author of the Universe, he cannot too soon rid himself of that notion. There are those, no doubt, who imagine that evolution has somehow supplanted God ; that there is some kind of an abstraction or apparatus called evolution, which has neither mind nor will, which originated planlessly, which works on in an haphazard way, and which by an infinite series of hits and misses has brought forth the universe as it now exists. There are scientific men with an anti-theological bias so strong that they are often inclined to use language which squints in this atheistic direction. But sound thinking gives no room, for any such conceptions. As I have said in the preceding chapter, there never was a time when the belief in creative intelligence had so much proof to support it as it has to-day. The doctrine of evolution, instead of weakening the faith in God of all those who have studied it profoundly, has given to many of them their strongest reasons for believing in an all-wise God.

What, then, is the doctrine of evolution ? The word signifies unfolding, or opening out. The unrolling of a map is an evolution. The opening of a flower bud is an evolution. The term would therefore itself appear to suggest some previous process of thought or activity. What is unfolded must first have been enfolded ; what is unrolled must first have been rolled. Evolution implies involution. The process which we are watching must have been prepared for beforehand. But without putting any stress on this mere verbal argument, let us ask what evolution means in the large sense of the word, — the sense in which it is most frequently used.

" To the scientific world," says the professor of biology in Wooster University, " evolution is a universal law of nature, whereby the existing order of things in the visible universe as viewed by man, including man himself, has come into its present state of existence through the interaction of certain forces operating in the direction of a progressive change from some unknown primitive condition of things. To the Christian the same thought might be expressed by saying that evolution is the divine mode of creation, whereby God has wrought out the existing order of things through the continuous operation of his creative power." These two dejfinitions, as I understand them, are only different ways of expressing the same truth.

The real question is whether the world as we see it to-day, with the different kinds of animals and plants upon, it was created in the beginning just as it now is, or substantially as it now is, making allowance for such changes as man himself has wrought ; or whether only a few forms of life were originally created, and whether these forms, by virtue of the forces with which they were endowed, and by their action upon one another, and the reaction of their environment upon them, have brought forth, in a long series of gTadual changes, the multitudinous forms of life that now appear. Was it true that in the morning of the creation, when the world came forth from the fiat of the Creator, the same plants and the same animals existed upon the earth as those which now exist ; that the pine and the oak and the beech and the birch and the rose and the myrtle and the daisy and the goldenrod and the wheat and the maize and all the rest of the plants which we now have were then in the Garden of Eden ; and that the animals which we now know, or at least the wild animals and birds and fishes and insects, were of the same orders and species as those which now exist upon the earth ? Gr, if perchance the existing kinds of plants and animals were not all created then, in their present forms, have they been created outright since, in successive periods, and placed upon the earth ?

In answering this question one or two facts come at once into clear light. It is certain that the earth itself is a very different planet from what it was in the beginning. Evidences of changes, mighty changes, through which it has been passing, abound on every hand. I presume that there are still many persons who are in the habit of conceiving that the world as we see it to-day is substantially the same as it has always been ; that the Creator, at the beginning, mapped out the continents and the oceans and the gulfs and the straits and the islands ; that it was the Creator's finger that literally drew the course of the Euphrates and the Nile and the Amazon and the Mississippi, from their sources to the sea ; that it was the Creator's hand that heaped up the mountains and the little hills and scooped out the valleys ; that laid the masonry of the gigantic cliffs of the Yosemite and the Lauterbrunnen Thai; that manufactured the coal and stowed it away under the hills of the Hocking valley and the Appalachian chain. Of course it is true that all this has been done by the Creator's power ; but the notion to which I refer is that these features of the earth took their present form as the immediate result of a creative fiat. And I dare say that there are many good people to whom the denial of this theory would seem a dangerous kind of skepticism. But it is certainly a fact which no fairly intelligent person can question that the present form of the earth is the result of a long series of physical changes.

" It probably existed," says the professor whom I have already quoted, " for millions of years as a separate planet, before water condensed upon its surface, and it is clearly demonstrated that it has existed for other millions of years since that time. During this period there has been in operation a constant process of progressive change, whereby, through the operation of natural agencies, such as water, atmosphere, heat and cold, and chemical affinity, the surface of the earth has been differentiated from a barren expanse of uniform character to the present varied features of land and water, continents and islands, lakes and rivers, forests and prairies, and beneath the surface, rocks and metals, coal and gas, and so on throughout the long list of natural products fitted for the use of man, — one of the most striking evidences of harmonious design, and yet so conclusively shown to have come into its present form through the operation of the law of progressive change that no intelligent person would venture to affirm that it was all created by an omnipotent fiat in the form in which we now find it. The very agencies that have wrought it all out may be readily observed to-day under our very eyes continuing the process. If any one doubts, for example, that the coal beds represent a gradual accumulation of vegetation, let him go to the mouth of the Mississippi and see the process in operation. If any one doubts that such vast accumulations of rock as the Trenton limestone under our very feet have been built up from the secretions of aniuial life, involving necessarily an untold lapse of time, let him go to the islands of the Pacific and examine the process where it is now open to his observation. In short, any one who studies carefully and in detail the teachings of geology must be convinced that the earth has come into its present condition through a gradual process of progressive changes ; in other words, that it has been created by evolution, from a relatively primitive condition."

That the world itself was made in this way we do positively know ; does not this furnish us some pretty good reasons for believing that the tribes which inhabit the earth have come into being in the same way ? When we find such a stupendous illustration as this of the Creator's method, is it not reasonable to suppose that all his work of creation is done upon the same plan ?

But the earth itself contains, in the close-locked archives of its rocky crust, other and even more conchisive evidences. I said that the question before us really is whether the species now existing were created, in their present forms, in the beginning. That, as I well remember, was the view which was presented to me in my boyhood ; I learned to believe that all the living things round about me were called into existence by the fiat of the Creator, in their present forms ; and that every form of life to which existence was given in the birth-morning of the creation was still li\'ing upon the earth. But the record in the rocks makes it plain that thousands upon thousands of species once existed which no longer exist, and gives us the strono^est reasons for believino' that most of the forms now existing are of comparatively recent origin. It is as plain as anything can be that constant changes in the forms of living beings have been taking place through all the age-long record of the earth. And it is easy for us to trace the history of some, at least, of the forms now existing, and to show how they have been modified from age to age. The fossil remains of plants and animals in the rocks exhibit to us, as Professor Mateer has told us, the following facts : —

" 1. The species of animals and plants now living have only existed upon the earth for a comparatively short time, geologically speaking.

" 2. While the earliest records of life upon the earth have probably all been obliterated, yet the earliest that have been preserved in fossil remains are all lower in grade of organization than their related forms now living.

" 3. There has gradually taken place all through the geological ages a constant extinction of old species and a constant appearance of new.

" 4. The new species thus constantly appearing usually mark an advance over the older species preceding them.

" These are the facts. What is their significance ? They indicate a progressive change, and therefore suggest the presence of an organic evolution."

The cumulative proof of this great process is, of course, too vast to be even hinted at in this brief discourse. Not only the fossils in the rocks, but the distribution of living species over the earth gives evidence of this, and comparative anatomy, which shows us the close resemblances of living creatures, and the minute gradations by which different species shade into each other, indicating that the higher may have grown out of the lower, adds its testimony. Most striking of all is the evidence from embryology, in that prenatal history of man of which the Psalmist knew very little, but of which he spoke very reverently, as we all ought to speak : —

" I will give thanks unto Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well.

My frame was not hidden from thee

When I was made in secret

And curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.

Thine eyes did see my imperfect substance,

And in thy book were all my members written,

Which day by day were fashioned

When as yet there was none of them."

Every living creature, from the lowest to the highest, begins its existence as a single, undifferentiated cell. The mighty elm, whose branches shadow an acre, was at first only a little winged seed, a single germ, which fell into the ground, and then began the process of evolution which brought forth the majestic tree. The stateliest and the most powerful of the animals was, in the beginning, a single undifferentiated cell, and the same thing is equally true of man. Says Professor Drummond : —

" The embryo of the future man begins life, like the primitive savage, in a one-roomed hut, a single simple cell. This cell is round and nearly microscopic in size. When fully formed it measures only one tenth of a line in diameter, and with the naked eye can be discerned as a very fine point. An outer covering, transparent as glass, surrounds this little sphere, and in the interior, embedded in protoplasm, lies a bright globular spot. In form, in size, in composition, there is no apparent difference between this human cell and that of any other mammal. The dog, the elephant, the lion, the ape, and a thousand others begin their widely different lives in a house the same as man's. At

3S WHAT IS L£FT OF THE OLD DOCTKTXES ?

an earlier stage, indeed, before it has taken on its pellucid coveriDg. this cell has afl&nities still more astonishing. For at that remote period the earlier forms of all living things, both plant and animal, are one. It is one of the most astounding facts of modem science that the first embryonic abodes of moss and fern and pine, of shark and crab and coral polyp, of lizard, leopard, monkey, and man are so exactly similar that the highest powers of mind and microscope fail to trace the smallest distinction between them." ^

But the most astonishing fact is that each of these forms of animal life, as it is developed from the cell, takes on, one after another, the different forms of the lower orders. There are stages in the dcTelopment of a man when he cannot be distinguished from a worm, other stages when his structure is identical with that of the fish : others when you cannot distinguish him from a reptile like the frog, others when he takes the form of a bird, and so on ; in the rapidly passing stages of his earlier history he is identified in shape, and apparently in substance, with one after another of his humbler fellow creatures. *' In man, as in the fish," says Professor Kingsley, ** the heart is at first two-chambered : then it becomes three-chambered, as in the lower reptiles, and later it develops the four-chambered condition, which it retains through life. In the blood vessels are the same gUl arteries as in the frog or shark, running in the 1 21c AsceM of Man. p. 62.

same direction and uniting to form the same dorsal aorta. There is the same tendency to form gill slits upon the side of the neck, and in exactly the same manner, as outgrowths from the throat toward the external skin. Later the blood vessels change ; the gill slits close up, all except the first, which persists as the Eustachian tube, connecting the throat with the inner ear. After a time the distinctively mammalian features become more prominent, and then comes a time when no one can decide between two embryos which is that of a dog and which that of man. Later the two can be distinguished, but still that of man and that of a monkey show no differences, that of man presents so many monkey-like features." ^ These facts of the embryonic history of man are as well established as any facts in science. And when we consider them well, and couple them with what we know of the slow and gradual processes by which the earth has been formed, and with what we have learned from the fossils in the rocks respecting the progressive changes in the tribes of living creatures, it certainly does not seem incredible that the method of creation has been the method of evolution ; that the different orders of living beings are genetically related; that the higher have sprung from the lower ; that all things that have life are our fellow creatures by the strongest of all bonds.

There are very few geologists, and still fewer biologists, who to-day dispute this great fact of

40 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTKINES ?

evolution. There are a few, but they do not represent the great body of scientific students. In truth this conception, that all things " consist," to use Paul's phrase, that the present is the child of the past, that genetic relations are to be looked for everywhere, has come to rule all our thinking ; the evolutionary idea, the evolutionary logic, finds expression in all our serious conversation ; we are all evolutionists in the habit of our minds, even when we are not aware of it. " Great scientific discoveries," says a very orthodox theologian, " are not merely new facts to be assimilated ; they involve new ways of looking at things. And this has been primarily the case with the law of evolution, which, once observed, has rapidly extended to every department of thought and history, and altered our attitude towards all knowledge. Organisms, nations, languages, institutions, customs, creeds, have all come to be regarded in the light of their development, and we feel that to understand what a thing really is, we must examine how it came to be. Evolution is in the air. It is the category of the age ; a ' partus temporig,' a necessary consequence of our wider field of comparison. We cannot place ourselves outside it, or limit the scope of its operation." ^

The question about evolution which has been

most hotly disputed respects not the fact, but the

mode. Mr. Darwin undertook to show us not only

that it is in progress, but how it goes forward,

^ J. R. lUingworth, in Lux Mundi, p. 151.

what is the law of its operation. His theory of natural selection, which I cannot now stop to explain, has been challenged by many naturalists. Undoubtedly it explains much ; but it does not explain everything. And when the scientific people undertake to tell us what it is that has wrought all these wonders, and precisely how it works, they sometimes get beyond their depth. There is very likely to be more in earth, as well as in heaven, than their philosophy finds room for. They do not succeed in explaining the beginnings of life ; the wisest of them do not try. Mr. Darwin assumes that life was here, in the world, in a few simple forms, at the beginning ; he assumes that the Creator breathed life into these forms ; he only tries to show how the life thus originated has been multiplied and modified. Respecting this process there is much that we do not know. But one or two things seem to be evident.

The first is that these original germs, out of which so much has come, must have been endowed with wonderful potencies and powers. When we see what a marvel of majesty and beauty can come forth from the minute germ of the acorn or the maple seed, we get a slight impression of the potentialities of life. The evolution reveals the miracle of the involution. Creation is far more wonderful when we think of all this manifold life of the world as having been originally packed away in a few simple forms, to be drawn forth thence in the slow progress of the ages, than when we imagine each of the forms we know as having been bidden into existence by an infinite fiat.

But there is something more in this process than the potentialities that the germs contain. The forces of life are there in the germs ; but all theories of evolution agree that the changes which take place in them are largel}^ influenced by the environment. It is what surrounds these growing things and acts upon them that largely shapes their development. It is this feature of the evolutionary doctrine which has been regarded, I suppose, as especially materialistic and dangerous. If the action and reaction of the environment upon the life accounted for nearly everything, there seemed to be little room left for a controlling purpose. But a deeper thought disposes of this misgiving. What is this environment ? What is the one word that describes this all encompassing Power which encircles every living thing ? We say that it is Nature, but it is truer to say that it is God. It is a natural world, in every force of which God is immanent. He who endowed these germs with their marvelous potencies surrounds them also with an environment in every part of which He is always present. It is this idea of an immanent God which makes the doctrine of evolution not only rational, but sublimely religious. And it is modern science which has forced upon us this conception. " The one absolutely impossible conception of God in the present day," says a modern theologian, " is that which represents Him as an occasional visitor. Science had pushed the deist's God farther and farther away, and at the moment when it seemed that He would be thrust out altogether, Darwinism appeared, and, under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend. It has conferred upon philosophy and religion an inestimable benefit by showing us that we must choose between two alternatives. Either God is everywhere present in nature, or He is nowhere. He cannot be here and not there. He cannot delegate his power to demigods called ' second causes.' In nature everything must be his work or nothing. We must frankly return to the Christian view of direct divine agency, the immanence of divine power in nature from end to end, the belief^ in a God in whom not only we, but all things have their being, or we must banish Him altogether. It seems as if, in the providence of God, the mission of modern science was to bring home to our unmetaphysical ways of thinking the great truth of the divine immanence in creation, which is not less essential to the Christian idea of God than to a philosophical view of nature." ^

Consider these facts. Modern science has made it impossible to think of the universe except as a revelation of intelligence. Its fundamental assumption is, that underlying everything, at the foundation of all existences, isjthought, is reason.

Modern science does not know how life began, but it shows us life developing from a few pri- 1 Lux Mundi, pp. 97, 98.

mary germs, into the order and beauty and grandeur of this marvelous world. Who stocked these germs with such miraculous powers, who packed into them the potencies that have unfolded into the life that now fills forest and field and air and ocean, that builds our houses and throngs our cities, science does not try to tell; it puts the mighty fact before us and leaves us to interpret it.

But when science tells us that these living things have been shaped and fashioned in their growth by their environment, we cannot help pausing to think what that Environment is ; and if the doctrine of the divine omnipresence is true, we certainly would not wish to deny what science affirms. If surrounding every one of these growing lives there is an Environment, in every atom, in every force of which the mighty God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, resides and works, and if all these changes are the results of the direct action of his wisdom and his power, the doctrine of evolution is a most impressive demonstration of the presence of God in the world. Let me close with a word of John Fiske, who is, perhaps, the most intelligent American expounder of this theory : —

"The doctrine of Evolution, which affects our thought about all things, brings before us with vividness the conception of an ever-present God, not an absentee God, who once manufactured a cosmic machine cajDable of running itself except for a little jog or poke here and there in the shape of a special providence. The doctrine of Evolution destroys the conception of the world as a machine. It makes God our constant refuge and support, and Nature his true revelation ; and when all its religious implications shall have been set forth, it will be seen to be the most potent ally that Christianity has ever had in elevating mankind."

ni

WHAT IS THE SUPERXATTRAL ?

The chief stumbling-block of reason in these days is found in the conception of the supernatural. If that could be got rid of, the way of belief would be made smooth for many feet.

The researches of science have succeeded in establishing on so firm a foundation the doctrine of the imiversality and immutability of law, that there seems to be no room left in the universe for the supernatural or the miraculous. A writer in the " Westminster Review," several years ago, used this language : " Anti-supernaturalism is the final, irreversible sentence of scientific philosophy, and the real dogmatist and hypothesis-maker is the theologian. That the world is governed by fixed laws is the first article in the creed of science, and to disbelieve whatever is at variance with those uniform laws, whatever contradicts a complete induction, is an imperative intellectual duty. A particular miracle is credible to him alone who already believes in supernatural agency. Its credibility rests on an assumption, the assumption of such agency. But our most comprehensive scientific experience has detected no such agency. There is no miracle in nature ; there is no evidence of any miracle-working agency in nature ; there is no fact in nature to justify the expectation of miracle." 1

Special attention may be called to this manifesto as a good sample of what modern science is not. Modern science does not make dogmatic statements of this kind. It does not say of any proposition, " This is the final, irreversible sentence of scientific philosophy." It only says, So far as the facts have been collected and compared they bear this interpretation. To assume that no more facts can be collected, that no new light can be thrown upon the subject, that the case is forever closed, is in the last degree unscientific. With John Robinson, of Ley den, the pastor of the church that landed on Plymouth Rock, science always expects more light to break forth from God's works as well as from God's word, and is always ready to welcome it. There is considerable of this kind of dogmatism — sometimes, as in this case, outspoken, sometimes latent and implicit — in the utterances of men who speak as the oracles of science. There is far less of it than there was twenty years ago, for the fact is plainer than once it was that the scientific spirit is a spirit of reverence ; but whenever we fall in with it we ought to remember that men who talk in this dogmatic tone are not, in any true sense of the word, scientific men ; the spirit

1 Quoted by James Freeman Clarke, in Orthodoxy : its Truths and Errors^ p. 81.

which speaks through their lips is the spirit of the old theology, masquerading in the garb of science.