viction and contention, for which there seems to be little room in the pale of their narrow and cold philosophy.

The grounds on which we base our view of man, of his relations and his destiny, are to them simply non-existent, or at least non-apparent, and not capable of being made to appear. God, Revelation, Redemption, to them belong to the world of dreams. Man is to their apprehension the last and completest product of that organising principle or force which somehow-that is all that they can say about it at present has introduced itself into the inorganic matter of the world, and behold it lives! it becomes plastic at once to the inward pressure of the vital principle, and reveals a capacity for the assumption of an inconceivable variety of organic forms. These shape themselves, we are instructed, under the stress of constant pressure, collision, and struggle for existence; in which the strongest, or rather the fittest, the best adapted to the external conditions prevailing around, survives and perpetuates itself. Thus there rises in the Creation an ascending series of specific forms, order rising out of and resting upon order, each more complex in structure and manifold in function than that on which it rests, until passing through countless stages of evolution, the series emerges and completes itself in man.

Man, according to this view of Nature, is simply the most complex, the most capable, and the most largely developed of the creatures. But all the human faculties and qualities, judgments, emotions,

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passions and volitions, are held to be but the highest functions of kindred qualities and capacities which are found in the lower stages of Creation. school can find no sufficient evidence of a breach of continuity in the chain of evolution, from the lowest organism which manifests vital functions—some are bolder yet, and include the inorganic-to the genius that created Hamlet, or read the secret order of the stars.

Reason and will, the distinctive human endowments in the popular judgment of all ages, are, in this scheme, but the highest function of that finest form of matter which enters into the composition of the human structure; "ohne Phosphor, kein Gedanke," without phosphorus, no thought: volition being equally the evolution of that battery of material elements in man's bodily organisation, on which the unseen currents are ever playing; motion having its key in the chemical constituents of his nature; all that he is, all that he does, all that he can become, being as surely settled by the arrangements of the particles of his frame and their relation to the currents of force around him, as are settled, on the same basis and with the same certainty, the track of a storm or the path of a star.

For such a being, if this be the true account of man's nature, Redemption can have no meaning, for there is absolutely nothing to redeem. His every act and every state is under the calm resistless rule of that law which maintains all the "sequences" of the Creation; to make man other than he is and must

be, would be to break up the whole order of the world.

I am very far from connecting what is called the theory of evolution as a means of accounting for the infinite variety and yet the perfect order of the developments of life, with a materialistic or atheistic philosophy. The two have unhappily been closely associated, and mainly, I think, from two causes. The first is the eagerness with which thinkers of the atheistic school have seized upon it, and sought to claim it as their own; the second, and I think the main cause of this evil association, has been the improvident and, indeed, insane dread of the theologians. They have to thank themselves if this attractive theory is supposed popularly to favour their opponents. How much of the atheism of this age, and of every age, is generated by the antagonism and denunciation of the Church, is a question which, while it fills one with shame, is not unsuggestive of hope. When the Church grows less fearful, more faithful and more far-sighted, we may believe that atheism will disappear from the world.

But there is no necessary, or even I venture to think, natural antipathy between evolution and a sound Christian philosophy. Conservative thinkers are beginning to acknowledge that this law of evolution plays a very distinguished part in the ordering of the majestic procession of life. At the same time, the gap between man and the lower animals is, in the judgment of accomplished students of nature, yet unbridged, and is not even in process of being bridged.

Nothing is established which destroys the belief that man's body reveals the direct, original touch of a creative hand. I do not presume to offer a decisive judgment on a point which it needs very deep and accurate scientific knowledge even to appreciate. Whether the views which have been stated with such learning and force by Mr. Wallace are right, or those which follow the direction of Mr. Darwin's book on the "Descent of Man," I do not attempt to decide. I can only say, that, as far as I am able to judge, Mr. Darwin's case seems very far from proved.

But it can hardly be denied that the course of modern scientific thought and discovery seems to be in the main following the track which Mr. Darwin has opened. It may find its limit speedily, and science may uphold the received theological ideas. But it is, at any rate, quite possible that we may have to accept it as a settled truth, that the human form has been developed, by a process of natural evolution (not natural selection, that could only have been one of the principles at work), out of the highest types of form in the animal creation, and that man began his career in this world in a condition but a very little raised above the brutes. It is not proved; I have no idea that it can be proved; but if it should be proved, it may open to us a new and very wonderful vision of the way of God in the creation and the ruling of the world.

There is a stage in which the human embryo cannot be distinguished from the embryos of the lower orders of the Creation; there is a stage at

which, by some process which utterly evades us, it becomes distinctively human; and there is a further stage in the development of the infant, in which the higher qualities of our nature unfold themselves in their full spiritual form, and are dealt with as the ruling powers in the house of life. It is possible that this may prove to be an image on a small scale of the travail of the Creation; there may be a working through all the stages of creature development up to the human, and a point-it has never been discovered as yet, nor has anything near to it-at which this creature which has shaped itself through the inward and outward pressure to the likeness of the human, becomes distinctly Man.

There is really nothing to startle or to frighten us in this doctrine of a law of evolution, of which natural selection will be one of the factors, and but one, which are at work. The doctrine will accord with an intelligent Christian theory of life. It is evolution by chance medley, as it were, which seems so absolutely incredible, things chancing to settle themselves by internecine struggle into this wonderful cosmos. An intelligible theory of evolution seems to demand a forecasting intelligence behind it. We seem to be brought face to face with a far-seeing mind and a far-reaching will, when we catch the first sign of an outward and upward pressure in the primal matter of the Creation, which, through innumerable ascending stages, was to issue forth at last in the human race.

There can be no doubt that the idea, were we