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EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 vy BY 
 JABEZ T. SUNDERLAND, A.M., D.D. 
 
 AUTHOR OF “THE ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE 
 BIBLE,” ETC. 
 
 With an Introduction by 
 
 DAVID STARR JORDAN 
 
 ‘That was not first which was spiritual, but that 
 which is natural; and afterward that which is 
 spiritual,” — Paul 
 
 “TI, too, rest in faith. That man’s perfection is 
 the crowning flower, toward which the urgent sap 
 in life’s great tree is pressing.” —George Eliot. 
 
 1925 
 THE BEACON PRESS, INC. 
 “ BOSTON 
 
 
 
Copyright, 1925, By 
 THE BEACON PRESS, INC. 
 All rights reserved 
 PRINTED IN U.S. A. 
 
“No more sublime conception of God has ever been 
 presented to the mind of man than that which is fur- 
 nished by Evolution, when it represents him as reveal- 
 ing himself through countless ages in the develop- 
 ment of the earth as an abode for man, and in the 
 age-long inbreathing of life into its constituent matter, 
 culminating in man with his spiritual nature and all 
 his God-like powers.”——PROFESSOR ROBERT A. MILUI- 
 KAN. 
 
 “A Scientist Confesses his Faith” (1928), p. 27. 
 
 iii. 
 
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PREFACE 
 
 THIS book has two very simple and prac- 
 tical objects in view. One is, to make clear, 
 if it may, within a brief compass, the main 
 reasons why the scientists of the world, with 
 searcely any exceptions, accept the doctrine 
 of Evolution as true. 
 
 The other is, to state as candidly and clear- 
 ly as possible the author’s reasons (which cer- 
 tainly coincide with those of very many 
 other persons) for regarding Evolution as 
 not an Enemy, but, when rightly understood, 
 a Friend and Ally of Religion. 
 
 As stated by Dr. Jordan in his Introduction 
 which follows, the book in its first form was 
 written several years ago, and published un- 
 der the not very accurate and rather confus- 
 ing title, ‘The Spark in the Clod.” At that 
 time there was not much public discussion of 
 the truth of Evolution—it being generally 
 _ believed, by scientists at least, that the ques- 
 tion had been settled once for all and that 
 the intelligence of the world had accepted the 
 doctrine with essentially the same unanimity 
 
 Vv. 
 
vi. PREFACE 
 
 as it had accepted gravitation and the spher- 
 icity of the earth. 
 
 Nor was there much public discussion of 
 the Relation of Evolution to Religion. The 
 old battle waged against Evolution from a 
 theological standpoint, on the ground that 
 it was atheistical and destroyed religion and 
 the Bible, which was waged with such fury 
 for twenty years and more after the appear- 
 ance of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” and 
 “Descent of Man,” had died away, and it was 
 widely believed among liberal religious think- 
 ers as well as among scientists, that it would 
 never be revived. | 
 
 But two or three years ago the whole coun- 
 try was suddenly startled to find that the old 
 battle was on once more, and with hardly 
 less intensity than in the days of Darwin, 
 Huxley, and Spencer. And to-day there seems 
 to be no waning of the struggle or sign of 
 truce. On the contrary, great Christian de- 
 nominations are making belief or non-belief 
 in Evolution a test of religious fellowship, 
 and the matter threatens permanently to di- 
 vide churches. Most surprising of all, and 
 perhaps most to be regretted, it is being wide- 
 ly made an educational and political ques- 
 tion. State Legislatures are actually by le- 
 gal entactment forbidding the teaching of 
 
PREFACE vii. 
 
 Evolution in all state-aided schools and col- 
 leges—something which five years agro would 
 have been unthinkable. 
 
 As already intimated, the ground of the 
 opposition to Evolution is mainly religious. 
 The old claim of forty or fifty years ago is 
 revived with fervid excitement, that it con- 
 tradicts the Bible account of the origin of the 
 world and of man, and therefore destroys 
 belief in God and overthrows religion. Thus 
 we have the amazing spectacle, not only of 
 both religion and science being dragged in- 
 to the arena of politics, but actually of leg- 
 islatures setting themselves up as judges 
 of what is and what is not true science, and of 
 what is and what is not true religion. 
 
 It is in view of this very serious condition 
 of things, and with the hope of contributing 
 a little to a true understanding of the iss. es 
 involved, that a new, revised, and enlarged 
 edition of the present book is offered to the 
 public. It is believed that it is in the highest 
 degree timely. All the questions that are 
 now attracting public attention, both as to 
 the truth of Evolution, and as to its relation 
 to Religion, are discussed in the light of the 
 fullest obtainable knowledge, and it is be- 
 lieved in a spirit of absolute fairness and can- 
 dor. 
 
viii. PREFACE 
 
 Much additional value is given to the book 
 by the illuminating Introduction written by 
 the eminent scientist, Dr. David Starr Jor- 
 dan, President-Emeritus of Leland Stanford 
 University, and by the three important Ap- 
 pendices, the first giving a condensed sum- 
 mary of the forces arrayed against Evolution, 
 and the others containing significant Testi- 
 monies regarding the truth of Evolution and 
 its real relation to Religion. 
 
 An extended Bibliography has also been 
 added, which will inform persons desiring 
 further knowledge, where to find the most 
 authoritative and the latest works bearing 
 on all points discussed in these pages. 
 
 J. T. SUNDERLAND. 
 New York, September, 1925 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 BY 
 DAVID STARR JORDAN 
 
 DR. SUNDERLAND’S series of Essays on Re- 
 ligion and its relation to Organic Evolution 
 was first published under the poetical title of 
 “The Spark in the Clod.” The volume is now 
 reissued with some revision, with important 
 additions, with an adequate and excellent 
 Bibliography, and under a title more simply 
 and truly descriptive of the author’s purpose. 
 This purpose is to show that between what 
 men have found out of the Universe and its 
 Creator, through long research with instru- 
 ments of precision, cannot be at variance 
 with the emotions in the human mind in con- 
 templation of the same facts and forces; that 
 is to say, cannot be at variance with true 
 religion. 
 
 Science deals with objective facts, and by 
 its own methods, methods which are the 
 source of all knowledge, human experience 
 tested and set in order: each detail verified 
 through instruments and methods of preci-. 
 
 ix. 
 
<7 INTRODUCTION 
 
 sion, the facts ascertained being then placed 
 in rational relation. These become truth to 
 us, when made intelligible, that is, stated in 
 terms of our own experience. 
 
 Science deals with what men have found 
 out, not with what they think out, nor with 
 what they dream or fancy, nor again with 
 ideas they have inherited from times when 
 tradition was subject to no means of correc- 
 tion. The word Evolution, borrowed from 
 philosophy, means in Science, Orderly 
 Change. We see with our own eyes that all 
 objects within our ken are always changing, 
 and that all change is throughout orderly. To 
 recognize order in the Universe marks the 
 advance from Paganism to Science. In the 
 Universe of which we are part, using Hux- 
 ley’s words, “Nothing endures save the flow 
 of energy and the rational intelligence which 
 pervades it.” This “Intelligence” we may 
 not define nor describe, for that would be 
 to circumscribe the Infinite. But no student 
 of Science can doubt its reality, and in cen- 
 turies of belief in little vengeful, and schem- 
 ing gods, scientific men are forced into the 
 position of defenders of the faith, as against 
 the limitations of certain types of mind who 
 can visualize only gods made in their own 
 image. 
 
INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 As everything we know is in a state of 
 Orderly Change, Evolution is but another 
 name for Nature, as Dr. Vernon Kellogg has 
 lately pointed out. But under the head of 
 Evolution two different series of processes 
 are included, the physical and the biological. 
 Changes may be relatively simple dealing 
 with units which may be assumed to be en- 
 tirely alike. From such conditions arise the 
 so-called exact sciences, those in which math- 
 ematics or the logic of quantities can be 
 brought into play, thus extending, not knowl- 
 edge, for mathematics adds no facts, but our 
 recognition of the full significance of the 
 facts we have. Thus physics, and its great 
 expansion astronomy, deal with motion, the 
 pushing and pulling of objects assumed to be 
 uniform. The science of chemistry deals with 
 internal conditions of objects, again assumed 
 to be alike, except for relations of atoms as 
 affecting one another by unions or repulsions. 
 This too is relatively exact science, because 
 mathematics is one of its instruments of 
 precision. 
 
 Set off against Physics and Chemistry we 
 have the science of Life or Biology. It deals 
 with the same chemical elements, subject to 
 the same physical laws, but under a new re- 
 lation, that of Organization. All living be- 
 
xii. INTRODUCTION 
 
 ings are organized, that is made up of parts 
 having different functions and definite con- 
 nections one with another. Thus living crea- 
 tures large or small, simple or complex, differ 
 in certain respects from all inorganic or un- 
 organized masses of matter. 
 
 All living beings possess Individuality. 
 That is, no two are alike, though common 
 likenesses among them permit and demand 
 classification. Such resemblances when deep- 
 seated have but one known explanation, that 
 is, of origin through common heredity. All 
 organisms possess Irritability. That is, they 
 are affected by external influences. This 
 feature ranges from the ‘“‘touchiness” of one- 
 celled creatures, through perfect intergrada- 
 tions, to reflex action which culminates in 
 Instinct on the one hand and on the other 
 Intellect, the highest manifestation of coop- 
 erative cell action. All organisms demand 
 Embolism. They wear out their own sub- 
 stance, replacing it by food. All organisms 
 have the function of Reproduction. They cast 
 off germ-cells which are capable under favor- 
 able circumstances of developing into the like- 
 ness of parents or ancestors. Finally Organ- 
 isms are subject to Evolution, from genera- 
 tion to generation, a relation unknown in 
 Physics and Chemistry. 
 
INTRODUCTION xiii. 
 
 In brief, Organic Evolution is the process 
 whereby those organisms which have run the 
 gauntlet of life leave progeny like themselves, 
 likewise capable of endurance and adaptation, 
 while those weaker or less adaptable tend to 
 fall behind or perish in the race. This proc- 
 ess is called Natural Selection, and consti- 
 tutes, with the innate traits of Heredity and 
 Variation, the controlling factor of Organic 
 Evolution. These however do not constitute 
 the sole factor concerned in life divergence. 
 In the Origin of Species the fina] division or 
 moulding is due to some form of “biological 
 friction” which, through its many forms of 
 barrier, causes separation and segregation 
 within each group. 
 
 With all these matters science and science 
 only is concerned. Science deals with real- 
 ities: that is with objective facts as impress- 
 ed on the nervous system of man. Its con- 
 clusions are thus to be distinguished from 
 memories (or past realities) from philosoph- 
 ical deductions, superstitions, fancies, de- 
 lusions, illusions, and from isolated facts not 
 yet set in order. We know no source of ob- 
 jective truth other than the human senses, 
 and no test of truth save through the verifi- 
 cation and expansion of the senses through 
 instruments of precision. The scope of 
 
xiv. INTRODUCTION 
 
 Science includes therefore all objective truth 
 and it questions the validity of all others. 
 
 The scope of Religion depends on the 
 definition we give to the term. The word is 
 used in different senses, these bearing a cer- 
 tain relation one to another, but by no means 
 identical in fact or spirit. From the stand- 
 point of scientific analysis religion is the in- 
 stinct of fear, awe, reverence, worship, faith, 
 duty, response to the lure of happiness, aris- 
 ing from the recognition of the gigantic 
 forces which surround humanity, and of our 
 desire to act in accord with their supposed 
 demands. In a historic sense a religion is 
 definable as the form in which the spirit of 
 reverence has become embodied in human 
 traditions and institutions. It is a system 
 of belief as well as of worship, and as such, 
 creeds, ceremonials, and organization have 
 grown up around it, either as aids, as para- 
 sites, or as both. The distinction between 
 the two uses of the word is indicated in the 
 epigram: Religions die, Religion never! 
 
 Religions are historic and traditional. The 
 assumed data of one religion are often con- 
 tradictory to those of another, and as Science 
 moves more rapidly than belief, the assumed 
 “fundamentals” of all of them become more 
 or less at variance with knowledge. 
 
INTEODUCTION xv. 
 
 Religion is natural and inherent, as un- 
 escapable as the feeling of love to which it 
 is closely akin, the two being subject to like 
 suppressions and like perversions. Both 
 spring “eternal in the human breast.” The 
 spirit of religion is quite as likely to be found 
 in dissent from historic religion as in con- 
 formity with it. All creeds have, in fact, 
 been written by heretics, that is, by dissen- 
 ters from the prevailing beliefs of the times. 
 
 In a strict or scientific sense Religion is 
 personal or individual. One may join an- 
 other’s communion, enter another’s cult, or 
 accept another’s creed, but individual religion 
 admits of no compromise. The question of 
 whether a religion is true or not has no mean- 
 ing. Religion does not rest on statements of 
 fact, either of science or of history. The 
 actual problem is as to whether impulses, 
 emotions, opinions or actions called religious 
 work out for human betterment. ‘Pure re- 
 ligion and undefiled” is not concerned with 
 theological subtleties. Its test is, Does it 
 “feed my lambs?” 
 
 In this Introduction I have briefly indi- 
 cated a layman’s point of view of some ele- 
 ments involved in the warfare of religion and 
 science. No such conflict can exist except 
 in the region in which tradition and super- 
 
xvi. INTRODUCTION 
 
 stition have attempted to forestall knowl- 
 edge. No problem of fact has been worked 
 out completely. Still less is there any which 
 have been thought out accurately in advance 
 of finding out. For example, churches and 
 schools have for two centuries done homage 
 to the ignorant and arrogant dictum of 
 Archbishop Usher as to the age of the. Uni- 
 verse. ‘‘Heaven and earth, center and cir- 
 cumference, were created all together in the 
 same instant, with clouds full of water, on 
 October 23, 4004 B.c. at nine o’clock in the 
 morning.” . 
 When nonsense like this is assumed to be 
 part of religion, it is not strange that com- 
 mon sense revolts. The real conflict there- 
 fore is not with Evolution or with any other 
 technical conclusion of Science, but with the 
 common sense of humanity, which finds no 
 virtue in superstition or in believing or pre- 
 tending to believe what we know is not true. 
 The same general views of nature and of 
 man are set forth by Dr. Sunderland from the 
 different point of view of a religious teacher. 
 
 Stanford University, June 30, 1925. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PREFACE : ; } ‘ i ; ’ 
 INTRODUCTION a 2 ; fi ; 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I, THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD ‘ b 
 II. THE EVOLUTION OF MAN é 3 4 
 Ill. THE EVoLuTION oF RELIGION . 4 ‘ 
 
 IV. THE PROBLEM OF PAIN AND EVIL IN THE 
 LIGHT OF EVOLUTION . s 3 , 
 
 V. IMMORTALITY IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLU- 
 TION es es s se e e . 
 
 VI. THE BIBLE, JESUS, AND CHRISTIANITY IN 
 THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION . 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 I. THE BATTLE TO DRIVE EVOLUTION OUT OF 
 THE SCHOOLS. ANTI-EVOLUTION FORCES 
 
 II. TESTIMONIES OF EMINENT SCIENTISTS AS 
 TO THE TRUTH OF EVOLUTION AND ITS 
 REAL RELATION TO RELIGION i 
 
 III. EvoLuTion INTERPRETED. ITs TRUE AND 
 DEEPER MEANING . x ; § 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ; ; : . ; 7 
 
 106 
 
 131 
 
 156 
 
 164 
 
 175 
 183 
 

 
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 
 
 As to the manner in which the physical world 
 came into existence, two theories offer them- 
 selves for our choice; only two. One is the 
 old theory, to which we have been accustomed 
 ‘all our lives. The other is the new theory, 
 which science teaches. In other words, one 
 is the theory of creation in a limited fixed 
 time, set forth in the book of Genesis. The 
 other is the modern scientific theory of Evo- 
 lution. 
 
 As thoughtful, candid, truth-loving men 
 and women, which of these theories shall we 
 accept? I do not mean, which would we pre- 
 fer to accept, if both were equally true. But 
 which must we accept, if we are to follow the 
 evidence which offers itself to us? 
 
 One of the most interesting revelations of 
 modern scholarship is the fact that nearly all 
 nations and peoples have their cosmogonies, 
 or theories of creation. 
 
 As soon as men rise above a very low grade 
 of civilization, they begin inevitably to ask 
 
2 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 themselves questions about the origin and 
 meaning of their own existence and that of 
 the world around them. Where did I come 
 from? Where did the world come from? 
 How did things come to be as they are? And 
 as children asking questions about the cause 
 of strange phenomena, and not getting sat- 
 isfactory answers, are very likely to make 
 up answers of their own, so men in all parts 
 of the world are found to have made up an- 
 swers to these questions of theirs about the 
 origin of the world and of human life. 
 These answers are their cosmogonies. This 
 explains the fact that, somewhere in the more 
 ancient portions of the literature of most 
 peoples that have a literature at all (usually 
 in their sacred books, if they have such 
 books) there are found recorded more or less 
 extensive cosmogonies, or accounts of the 
 creation of the world and of man, according 
 to the theories which they have thought out 
 for themselves on these subjects; and even 
 among peoples who have no literature and 
 no written language, it is common to find 
 legends and tales of the same character, 
 which pass from person to person and are 
 handed down from father to son orally. 
 
 Thus it appears that our Bible is not alone 
 in containing a cosmogony. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 3 
 
 It will, perhaps, be worth our while, before 
 examining the cosmogeny of Genesis, to 
 glance briefly at a few of the creation theories 
 which are, or have been, entertained by 
 non-Christian peoples. 
 
 Sir John Lubbock tells us that when a mis- 
 Sionary asked the Queen of Singa, in West- 
 ern Africa, who made the world, she replied 
 without hesitation, ““My ancestors.” This is 
 one form of the creation theory. 
 
 Some rude tribes believe that all things 
 made themselves. This is another form. 
 
 The idea that all things originated in some 
 way from water, has been very widely enter- 
 tained, particularly among primitive peoples. 
 The Chippewa Indians held the conception of 
 the world as originally existing in the form 
 of a vast body of water, out of which the 
 Great Spirit raised the land. The Mingoes 
 and Ottawas represent a rat as bringing a 
 grain of sand from the bottom of the prim- 
 itive ocean, and out of that sand-grain the 
 dry land grew. Unfortunately, they do not 
 tell us the origin of the rat. In Polynesian 
 mythology the earth and heaven always ex- 
 isted; but the earth was at first covered with 
 water. At length the Supreme Being drew 
 up New Zealand by means of an enchanted 
 fish-hook. 
 
4 EVOLUTION AND EELIGION 
 
 The conception of the world as orginating 
 in an egg is the one which perhaps has been 
 most widely held. This conception, under 
 one form or another, is found in Finland, 
 Polynesia, China, Phenicia, Egypt, and 
 India. The notion of the Finns was that the 
 yolk of the primal egg became the earth, and 
 the white the all-surrounding ocean. This 
 reminds one of the idea of the Brahmans, 
 found in the Laws of Manu, one of the 
 Sacred Books of India, which opens with a 
 cosmogony, as does our Old Testament. In 
 that cosmogony we are told of the Self-exist- 
 ent Lord, who with a thought created the 
 waters, and deposited in them a seed, which 
 became a golden egg, in which egg he himself 
 was born as Brahma, the progenitor of all 
 the worlds. 
 
 The Scandinavian legend of creation gives 
 us first of alla yawning gulf of chaos or noth- 
 ingness. On the north of it was a region 
 of boundless ice, and on the south another of 
 boundless flame. From the contact of the ice 
 and the fire arose the giant Ymir, from whose 
 body, after he had been slain, were formed 
 the earth and the heavens. 
 
 According to the Greek cosmogony, in the 
 beginning was a vast and formless chaos, 
 from which the earth and heaven separated 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 5 
 
 themselves as independent divinities. These 
 married, and from them sprung demigods 
 and men. 
 
 The Zend-Avesta, “he sacred book of the 
 ancient Persians, carries the beginning of 
 creation back to the Eternal Being. The 
 Eternal Being produced two gods; Ormuzd 
 the God of Light, and Ahriman the God of 
 Darkness. The God of Light created the 
 heavens and the earth, in six periods of time, 
 man being made last. 
 
 It is not strange that many of these crea- 
 tion theories, coming from so early periods 
 as they do in the history of races, should be 
 crude and even childish. Some of them, how- 
 ever, manifest much reflection and insight. 
 For example, some of the thoughts expressed 
 in the Hindu Vedas regarding God as the 
 Creator and upholder of all things, are very 
 lofty. I will quote a few lines of a hymn 
 from the Rig Veda, which is probably older 
 than any portion of our own Bible, and many 
 centuries older than the book of Genesis. 
 Sings the ancient Hindu poet: 
 
 “In the beginning there arose the Source of golden 
 light ; 
 
 He was the only born Lord of all that is: He 
 established the earth and the sky; 
 
6 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 “He who through his power is the only King of the 
 breathing and awakening world, 
 He who governs all, man and beast; 
 
 “He whose power these snowy mountains, whose 
 power the sea proclaims, with the distant river; 
 He whose these regions are, as it were, his two arms; 
 
 “He through whom the sky is bright and the earth 
 firm, 
 
 He through whom the heaven was established, he who 
 measured out the light in the air; 
 
 “He who by his might looked even over the water- 
 clouds, 
 He who is the one God above the gods; 
 
 “QO Prajapati, no other than thou is Lord over all 
 these created things.’ 
 
 Though this Vedic hymn does not lay down 
 any complete order of creation, yet its gen- 
 eral conception of creation, and of God as the 
 Creator, is very high, and is worthy, as Max 
 Miller so well urges, to stand beside the 
 highest utterances of the Old Testament on 
 this subject. 
 
 What are these creation stories? Are they 
 history? Are they records of real events? 
 Are they not rather legends, myths, dreams, 
 creations of the imaginative faculty of men 
 asking themselves these questions, which all 
 men must ask, of how the world and the 
 
 1 Rig Veda, x. 121 (abridged). 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 7 
 
 things that it contains came to be. And final- 
 ly, coming to our own story of the creation, 
 as it appears in the book of Genesis, is it 
 different in kind? Or does it fall into the 
 same class with those which we have found 
 among other peoples? Is there any more 
 reason for believing that the Hebrew cos- 
 mogony is actual history than there is for be- 
 lieving that the cosmogonies of Greece and 
 India are history? Does the Genesis story 
 bear any marks of history? Does it stand the 
 tests of modern science? Or does a critical 
 examination show at every point its legend- 
 ary character? Let us see. 
 
 As preliminary to such an examination, let 
 me quote the words of Dean Stanley, spoken 
 in Westminster Abbey, at the funeral of Sir 
 Charles Lyell, the great geologist. Said 
 Stanley :— 
 
 “It is well known that when the study of geology 
 first arose it was involved in interminable schemes 
 of reconcilation with the letter of the Scripture. 
 There were and are two modes of reconciliation, 
 which have each totally and deservedly failed. 
 The one attempts to wrest the words of the Bible 
 from their real meaning, and force them to speak 
 the language of science; and the other attempts to 
 falsify science to meet the supposed requirements 
 of the Bible. It is now clear to all students of the 
 Bible that the first and second chapters of Genesis 
 
8 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 contain two narratives of the creation, side by side, 
 differing from each other in almost every particular 
 of time, place, and order. It is now known that the 
 vast epochs demanded by scientific observation are 
 incompatible both with the 6,000 years of the 
 Mosaic chronology and the six days of the Mosaic 
 creation.” 
 
 It should be borne in mind that this is the 
 utterance, not of a radical or an iconoclast, 
 but of one of the most conscientious and de- 
 vout of modern Christian scholars. I wish 
 especially to call attention to his statement 
 that there are two narratives, and that they 
 are contradictory—though both involve the 
 theory of special creations, and are equally 
 hostile to the theory of Evolution. Where 
 are these two narratives to be found? The 
 first begins with Genesis 1:1, and ends with 
 Genesis 2:4 (middle of verse); the second 
 begins where the first leaves off, and ends 
 with Genesis 2:25. Let us inquire with some 
 care as to the contents of the first, leaving 
 the other for examination in the following 
 chapter, with which it is more closely related. 
 
 The first Genesis story of creation opens 
 with the words: “In the beginning God 
 created the heavens and the earth.” As it 
 proceeds it states the time occupied in the 
 creative work to have been six days—each 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 9 
 
 with its evening and morning; and it informs 
 us what objects were made each day. 
 
 On the first day light was created, and di- 
 vided from the darkness, thus causing day 
 and night. On the second day a firmament, 
 that is, a roof or dome (what we call the sky, 
 believed by the Hebrews to he solid like 
 glass) was made, to separate the waters 
 above it (stored there as reservoirs for rain) 
 from the waters below it. We learn else- 
 where that this firmament or crystal dome 
 was believed to have in it windows, which 
 could be opened when it was necessary to 
 pour down rain upon the earth. On the 
 third day, the remainder of the waters 
 (those that were beneath the sky-roof) were 
 collected together to form the seas; and the 
 land which was thus brought to view was 
 made to bring forth grass, herbs, and trees. 
 On the fourth day God created the sun, moon, 
 and stars. On the fifth day he made the fish 
 of the sea and the birds of the air. On the 
 sixth day he caused the earth to bring forth 
 four-footed beasts and creeping things; and 
 finally, he created man in his own image. 
 This completes the six days of the working 
 week which the Creator is represented as 
 observing. On the following day, the Sab- 
 bath, he rested. 
 
10 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 Such is the first of the Genesis stories of 
 the creation of the world and the things 
 which it contains. 
 
 What are we to say concerning this story? 
 First, who wrote it? We do not know. Did 
 not Moses? No biblical scholar of any stand- 
 . ing now holds to the Mosaic authorship of 
 Genesis. Could the writer, whoever he was, 
 have been an eye-witness? Certainly not, 
 for most of the events described occurred 
 before the creation of man. The only way 
 the writer could know about the facts was 
 by being told by the Creator himself. Does 
 the writer of Genesis claim that the Creator 
 ‘gave him information? Certainly not. 
 
 Do we know when and where this story 
 arose? Approximately, yes. It seems to 
 have arisen not in Palestine, but in Baby- 
 lonia. The Genesis creation-narratives, as 
 also those of the Fall and the Flood, appear 
 to have been originally Babylonian or Chal- 
 dean legends or myths. They seem to 
 have been obtained by the Jews from 
 Babylon, perhaps at the time of their cap- 
 tivity there, about five and a half centuries 
 before Christ, or perhaps much earlier, and 
 to have been revised and changed by them, 
 and finally adopted and given a place in their 
 Book of Genesis, which is not the oldest, but 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 11 
 
 one of the later books of the Old Testament. 
 
 But if we find the Genesis record without 
 value as history, we also find it containing 
 statements which invalidate it as science. 
 
 First of all, its time is too short—almost 
 infinitely so—to be a true account of the 
 creation of the world. To be sure, there is 
 a system of interpretation which claims that 
 the “days” mentioned in Genesis mean, not 
 days, but indefinite periods which may be 
 prolonged to enormous lengths. But there is 
 nothing in the record which warrants any 
 such interpretation. The narrative is plain, 
 simple, straightforward. The days are 
 spoken of as real days, each having its eve- 
 ning and its morning. Everything shows that 
 the writer meant exactly what he said, name- 
 ly, literal “days.” Any system of interpre- 
 tation which makes him mean anything else 
 is one which turns the whole Bible into a 
 book of riddles. 
 
 An equal difficulty is the lateness of the 
 creation, or its nearness to our own time. 
 If we turn to our Bibles, in the common ver- 
 sion, we find printed in the margin opposite 
 the creation story, the date, 4004 B.c. By any 
 fair interpretation of the Old Testament rec- 
 ords, it is impossible to carry back the date 
 of the creation as given in Genesis much be- 
 
12 EVOLUTION AND EELIGION 
 
 yond that time. According to this reckoning 
 the earth is a little less than six thousand 
 years old. The sun and stars are of the same 
 age. But science teaches us that to find the 
 beginning of the earth we must go back not 
 six thousand, but millions probably hundreds 
 of millions of years; and the earth is young 
 compared with the sun and stars. Huxley 
 reckons that the production of the carbon- 
 iferous or coal formation required six mill- 
 ion years. It is estimated that the produc- 
 tion of the cretaceous, or chalk, occupied a 
 period as long. But the deposit of these two 
 formations were but brief steps in the geo- 
 logic history of the globe. Sir Archibald 
 Geikie claims one hundred million years as 
 the minimum time during which there has 
 been life on the earth. This agrees with 
 the estimate of Sir William Thompson (Lord 
 Kelvin). Sir Charles Lyell thinks two hun- 
 dred and forty million years are necessary 
 for the deposit of all the stratified rocks. 
 Helmholtz calculates that the solar system 
 has been in existence five hundred million 
 years. Thus we see that science and the 
 Genesis record lack much of agreeing as to 
 the date of the creation both of the earth and 
 of the heavenly bodies. 
 
 But these are not all of our scientific diffi- 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 13 
 
 culties. We find in the Genesis account light 
 created before the sun; as if there could be 
 light without the source of light. Day and 
 night are divided from each other before 
 there is any sun; as if that were possible. 
 The sky is represented (according to the 
 belief of the ancient time) as a solid firma- 
 ment or dome, separating the waters above 
 it from the waters below. Every child to- 
 day knows how mistaken is this conception. 
 Plants are represented as created before the 
 sun; as if vegetation or any form of life 
 could exist a moment without the sun’s light 
 and heat. The sun is said to have been 
 created later than the earth; when science 
 teaches us that the sun came into being long 
 before the earth, and that the earth is its 
 babe. The stars, too, are represented by the 
 Genesis writer as made after the earth; when 
 we know that the earth is a creature of yes- 
 terday compared with most of the stars— 
 many of the stars, indeed, being vastly older 
 than the sun itself. Plants are represented 
 as created long before animals—one on the 
 third day and the other not until the fifth. 
 Here again science says, No, the evidence is 
 very strong that plants and animals came in- 
 to existence practically together. 
 
 Thus it appears that the Genesis story 
 
14 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 breaks down at every point when we attempt 
 to regard it as either history or science, that 
 is to say, as a record of actual facts. 
 
 What, then, is it? The only answer possi- 
 ble to be given in the light of modern knowl- 
 edge is the one suggested by the similar crea- 
 / tion stories found among many peoples, a 
 few of which have already been noted. It 
 is legend, it is myth—as clearly so as are 
 the cosmogonies of Greece and India. It is 
 an attempt made in an early age by some 
 gifted mind, or rather by many minds, to 
 answer out of their own thoughts the ques- 
 tion which man has been forever asking, 
 How did things come to be? This is the 
 position now taken by nearly all the leading 
 biblical scholars of the world. This is the 
 position taken by practically all scientists. 
 Regarded as a work of the devout imagina- 
 tion the Genesis narrative is interesting and 
 valuable. It has been well called “A Poem 
 of Creation.” As such it is striking, impres- 
 Sive, in parts sublime. But as something to 
 be regarded as facts, it no more stands the 
 critical tests of our time than would Milton’s 
 “Paradise Lost,” if that great work of the 
 creative imagination were set up as history 
 or science. It is not the story of how God 
 did create the earth and the heavens. It is a 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 15 
 
 picture of how some gifted soul or souls of 
 the ancient world dreamed that the creative 
 process went on. 
 
 So much, then, for the theory, which has so 
 long been almost universally accepted in the 
 Christian World, that the world was created 
 in a limited and fixed time, as set forth in the 
 first chapter of Genesis. 
 
 There is one other theory, only one, that 
 claims our attention. It is the modern scien- 
 tific theory of Evolution. Let us now turn 
 to that to see what are the evidences of its 
 truth. 
 
 Of course, in the limited space of a single 
 chapter, I cannot undertake to detail all or a 
 tithe of the evidence which believers in Evo- 
 lution claim for the doctrine. Nor is this 
 necessary. All I can do—and it is enough— 
 will be to indicate something of the character 
 of the proofs relied on, in order to show how 
 direct and constant is their appeal to fact, 
 and therefore how unequivocal and inescapa- 
 ble are the conclusions to which they lead. 
 
 Let me begin with suns and planets. Why 
 is it believed that the origin of these is by 
 evolution? Because we have only to look in- 
 to the heavens above us to see the evolution- 
 ary process going on. The astronomer by 
 means of his telescope and his trained powers 
 
16 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 of observation is able to discover world-mak- 
 ing in every stage of progress. 
 
 Here is a nebula—a vast fiery cloud. What 
 is that? Clearly it is world-stuff, or material 
 out of which worlds are made. Here is an- 
 othey nebula. Condensation has begun at 
 one or more points, and perhaps evidence of 
 a whirling motion is apparent. What does 
 that mean? It means that world-evolution 
 is in process. Here is a nebula that has con- 
 densed into a great central sun, and from it 
 a ring has separated. What is that ring? 
 It is the first step toward a planet. Thus it 
 is that the telescope, if not the naked eye, 
 reveals to us sun-making and planet-making 
 in all stages. Could proof be stronger that 
 Evolution is the law of the heavens above our 
 heads? And if other worlds are formed by 
 the process of Evolution, is not the presump- 
 tion strong that ours was formed in the same 
 way? 
 
 Turn now from the heavens to the earth— 
 from astronomy to geology. Here again the 
 evolutionist appeals not to hearsay, or dream, 
 or guess, but to observed and verified fact. 
 
 How did the solid crust of the earth come 
 to be? He examines the crust to see if there 
 be not written upon it a record. A wonder- 
 ful record he finds—a record inscribed by 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 17 
 
 nature herself, by the hand of her elements 
 and forces—fire and water and wind and ice. 
 And so he sets himself to reading the record. 
 He studies volcanoes, and the effect of heat 
 on rocks. He studies stratification, as it is 
 going on to-day, and as it reveals its laws to 
 him in a thousand ways. He studies the rise 
 and subsidence of lands, and the consequent 
 changing of sea lines, as these phenomena are 
 seen now and are traceable in past ages. He 
 studies the laws of erosion, by which moun- 
 tains are cut down and carried into the sea, 
 and vast river beds are scooped out. He 
 studies the action of wind and rain and frost 
 and heat in disintegrating rocks and chang- 
 ing them into soil. He studies the laws of 
 glaciers, and observes how they plane down 
 hills and fill up valleys, and carry their enor- 
 mous loads of rock and earth half across 
 continents. 
 
 He knows that the laws and forces whose 
 effects he is studying are constant, and there- 
 fore that he holds in his hand the key to the 
 past history of the surface of the planet, and 
 how it has come to be what he sees it now. 
 Change has been ever going on. It has left 
 its record everywhere upon the rocks; and 
 what is that record? It is Evolution. 
 
 It took a very long time to fit the earth for 
 
18 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 life, even life of the lowest kinds. But the 
 preparation was made, and life came. 
 
 As to how life originated, eivastatsets fs? 
 freely confess that they are in ignorance. 
 The tendency is to believe that the evolution- 
 ary process has suffered no break, and there- 
 fore that life was developed somehow from 
 the not-living. But this belief is based rather 
 upon faith in the uniformity of nature’s 
 methods than upon any direct proof. If life 
 did come by an evolutionary process from 
 the not-living, it was at a time and under 
 circumstances such as we know nothing of 
 and possibly can know nothing of, and such 
 as probably can never be repeated in the 
 history of the planet. 
 
 Even if we grant that life at its begin- 
 ning was a special creation, everything in- 
 dicates that that beginning was so very low 
 down and so simple as to form only the 
 merest starting-point for a life-history of the 
 globe. From that simple beginning (in an 
 organic substance probably differing only in 
 the slightest possible degree from the inor- 
 ganic) it has developed on and up, from the 
 lower to the higher, from the simpler to the 
 more complex, dividing early into two great 
 main streams, vegetable and animal life, then 
 dividing and sub-dividing again and again, 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 19 
 
 and ever multiplying and unfolding, until at 
 last we have the earth covered with all the 
 rich and varied and manifold forms of life 
 which appear on its surface and in its waters 
 to-day. How do we know that all this won- 
 derful evolution of life has gone on? We 
 know it by reading the story in nature’s stone 
 book, where it is all written down in char- 
 acters that cannot possibly be misunderstood. 
 
 Strong arguments in support of the evo- 
 lution theory may be deduced from embry- 
 ology, morphology, and the geographical dis- 
 tribution of organisms. But these I must 
 pass over. Enough, however, has been said 
 to show the general nature of the evidence on 
 which the theory rests. Its appeal is every- 
 where not to credulity but to knowledge, not 
 to guesses but to the most carefully verified 
 facts. 
 
 The theory may be said to have received 
 universal acceptance among scientists. Says 
 Professor Edwin G. Conklin: 
 
 “The whole scientific world long since was con- 
 vinced of the truth of Evolution, and every year which 
 has passed since the publication of “The Origin of 
 Species, in 1859, has added to the mountain of evidence 
 which has been piled up in its favor. . .. There 
 is probably not a single biological investigator in the 
 
20 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 world to-day who is not convinced of the truth of 
 Evolution.’ 
 
 It is easy to see that for the men who are 
 best qualified to judge of a scientific doctrine 
 to have given in their adhesion to Evolution 
 with such unanimity, is significant in the 
 highest degree. When the new doctrine first 
 came on the scene it was virtually without 
 a friend. The leaders of scientific opinion 
 to whom it made its appeal had all been 
 trained in other schools of thought, and came 
 to the investigation of the claims of Evolution 
 with their prepossessions against it. They 
 had believed and taught, and not a few of 
 them written books, in support of a different 
 theory, which must be relinquished if the 
 claims of Darwin were true. Under such cir- 
 cumstances it was in the nature of things that 
 only proofs which were seen to be of the 
 weightiest character could convert them to the 
 new doctrine. Yet with very few exceptions 
 they were coverted; and as we have seen, 
 there is not a scientist of any note living to- 
 day who does not accept the evolution theory 
 in some form. 
 
 We have now before us, in brief, the two 
 theories of the origin of the world, which 
 present themselves to modern men asking 
 
 1Evolution and the Bible (1922), p. 6. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 21 
 
 for acceptance. Is there any question which 
 one we must receive, if we are truth-loving, 
 and care at all to have our beliefs based on 
 realities? 
 
 - And now we come to the important ques- 
 tion of the relative religious influence and 
 value of the two theories. 
 
 I know the fact that one is ancient and 
 venerable, while the other is new, and es- 
 pecially the fact that one is contained in the 
 Bible, while the other is not, may seem to 
 give the greater religious claim to the theory 
 of creation found in Genesis. 
 
 And yet is the claim necessarily valid? 
 Has God no truth besides that which the 
 Bible contains? Rather, if we are not 
 atheists, must we not say that all truth is of 
 God, whether found on parchment or on 
 stone; whether inscribed by pen held by hu- 
 man hand, or by wind and rain and ice and 
 fire on mountain sides; whether written two 
 thousand years ago in Palestine, or to-day on 
 the face of the starry sky above our heads, or 
 of the earth beneath our feet? 
 
 Men who have never learned to see God, 
 anywhere except in the past, are always 
 afraid of any new truth that bears upon re- 
 ligion. But how faithless and God-dishonor- 
 ing is such a fear! Is God a God of the 
 
22 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 past only? Are his revelations ended? Is 
 there to be progress in everything else con- 
 nected with man’s life except that which is 
 highest of all, the moral and spiritual? With- 
 out the opening of eyes to new truth in re- 
 ligion, where would have been the Protestant 
 Reformation? Where would have been Chris- 
 tianity itself? Where would have been any 
 of the great forward movements which have 
 quickened and enlarged the world’s religious 
 thought and life? 
 
 The foundations of religion are not in a 
 book. They are rather in the soul of man. 
 And if they are in the soul of man, the ac- 
 ceptance of ‘the belief that God’s creation is 
 perennial, continuous, eternal, cannot dis- 
 turb them, or do anything except deepen and 
 strengthen them. 
 
 It is asserted by some that Evolution is 
 atheistic; that it puts God out of the uni- 
 verse, and leaves us only law instead. True, 
 there are possible forms of the evolution 
 theory which are atheistic, which push God 
 one side, and give us only law. But there are 
 other forms of it which are profoundly 
 theistic—which fill the universe full of God, 
 as no other theory known to man does, cer- 
 tainly far more than the Genesis theory it- 
 self does. That makes him a creator from 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 23 
 
 without. This makes him a creator within 
 —his creative power operates in all things 
 from atom to sun. That makes him a creator 
 of the world, once; then he withdraws, and 
 so far as creative function is concerned, is 
 forever thereafter an absentee God. This 
 makes him a creative intelligence and power 
 that never sleeps and never withdraws from - 
 any atom of his universe. 
 
 “The world is the ring of his spells, 
 The play of his miracles. 
 
 Ever fresh the broad creation, 
 
 A divine improvisation, 
 
 From the heart of God proceeds, 
 A single will, a million deeds. 
 
 “He is the axis of each star, 
 
 He is the sparkle of each spar, 
 
 He is the heart of every creature, 
 
 He is the meaning of each feature; 
 
 And his mind is in the sky 
 
 Than all it holds more deep, more high.” 
 
 Thus it is that the doctrine of Evolution! 
 ought to fill, and rightly understood does fill, 
 all the universe with God, as the meaning,’ 
 and the ever-living, never-sleeping creative 
 power of it all. 
 
 As to the fear that Evolution will dethrone 
 
 God because it enthrones law—what is law? 
 
24 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 What can it be but the sign and manifesta- 
 tion of One without whom law could not 
 exist? Is law a Power? Rather is it the path 
 along which a power—the Eternal Power— 
 marches to the attainment of its great: ends. 
 “God is law, say the wise, O soul, and let us rejoice; 
 For if he thunder by law, the thunder is yet His 
 voice.” 
 
 Men who cling to the old and are afraid 
 of the new talk eloquently about the Genesis 
 story of the creation of the world being a 
 “revelation” of God. And because it is a 
 revelation we are told it must be true. But 
 how is it a revelation? The claim is quite 
 incorrect. In truth, it is in Evolution that we 
 have a revelation of God; in all previous 
 theories of creation we have had only asser- 
 tions of God. What does the Genesis story 
 do? It asserts; it asserts that God at a cer- 
 tain time did so and so. It shows us nothing. 
 It uncovers nothing. It reveals nothing. 
 (To reveal is to show or to uncover.) What 
 does Evolution do? It uncovers facts of 
 nature. It shows us God actually doing. It 
 exhibits the divine creative work going on 
 _before our eyes, in the past and in the pres- 
 ent. Thus God is not simply asserted as a 
 creator, but he is revealed as a creator. 
 Which, then, brings God nearer to us and 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 25 
 
 makes him more real and certain, the old or 
 the new? 
 
 Tell me the story of Michael Angelo and 
 his great art creations, and you do much. 
 But take me into Michael Angelo’s studio, 
 and let me see the great master’s tools, his 
 plans, his unfinished sketches, his work act- 
 ually going forward, and you do vastly more. 
 Is it not clear how this applies to the two 
 creation theories? The old creation theory 
 talks to me about the supreme World-Artist 
 —tells me a story as to what he did once on 
 a time in a far distant past. The new 
 thought of creation by Evolution takes me 
 by the hand and leads me into the great 
 Artist’s world-studio, universe-studio, amidst 
 his tools of nature-forces and laws, his de- 
 signs of plants and animals and worlds, his 
 work done and being done, of life-building 
 and universe-building and man-building, and 
 thus reveals him, and brings him nearer to 
 me, and lets me see him, feel him, touch him, 
 know him, as the other never did and never 
 can. 
 
 Men talk about the doctrine of Evolution 
 being irreligious. What a strange use of 
 words. Is it irreligious to enlarge the sphere 
 of God’s power and work from a narrow and 
 circumscribed earth to a boundless universe? 
 
26 EVOLUTION AND EELIGION 
 
 Is it irreligious to extend the time of his 
 creative activity from six days to ages with- 
 out beginning and without end? Is it irre- 
 ligious to transform our thought of a creator 
 from that of a powerful mechanic, or potter, 
 operating in one limited place, to that of a 
 Divine Spirit quickening and giving life to 
 his children and his worlds everywhere? 
 
 No, it will be seen some day that the 
 thought of Evolution, fully comprehended 
 in its meanings and its bearings, is a mighty 
 enlarger and exalter of religion, a mighty dig- 
 nifier and ennobler of man, a mighty revealer 
 and glorifier of God. 
 
 When will men learn that God is the God 
 of the living, not of the dead? When will 
 they learn that the eternal ages are in his 
 hand? When will they discover that the 
 mighty laws and forces by which the world 
 moves on to its great destiny, are his? When 
 will they be wise enough to cease fighting or 
 fearing the great new revelations of his 
 truth in nature and in man, by which he is 
 rolling the world on into the light? 
 
CHAPTER II 
 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 
 
 IN the preceding chapter we found two 
 theories of the origin of the world offering 
 themselves for our choice—only two; namely, 
 the theory of creation by sudden fiat, found 
 in the book of Genesis, and the modern 
 scientific theory of Evolution. As soon as 
 we pass to the subject of the origin of man, 
 we find the same two theories presenting 
 themselves for our choice again. Was man 
 created at a given fixed time, from the dust 
 of the ground, as the Genesis story repre- 
 sents? Or did he, as well as the world in 
 which he lives, come into being by an evolu- 
 tionary process? 
 
 Let us first examine the Genesis story, and 
 see what claim that offers for our credence. 
 
 As I have already pointed out, the book of 
 Genesis gives two different and conflicting 
 accounts of man’s creation. According to 
 the first account, all other things are made 
 before man; man is made last. According to 
 the second account, as given in our common 
 English version, the order of creation is as 
 
28 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 follows: first, the earth and heavens; second, 
 plants and herbs (made, but not planted in 
 the ground); third, man; fourth, a garden 
 (from the soil of which trees are made to 
 grow); fifth, all beasts and birds;. sixth, 
 woman. According to the first account, man 
 and woman are created at the same time, and 
 presumably out of the same material. Ac- 
 cording to the second account, they are 
 created at different times, and out of very 
 different material. In other words, man is 
 created early, out of the dust of the ground, 
 after which he is left a long time alone, his 
 only companions being the beasts of the field. 
 Then the Lord causes a deep sleep to fall 
 upon him and while he sleeps, his side is 
 opened, a rib is taken out, and from this is 
 made a woman, to be a helpmeet for him. 
 Then follows the story of the Paradise 
 Garden, with its tree of forbidden fruit, of 
 which Adam and Eve, tempted by a talking 
 serpent, eat, and as a consequence are driven 
 out. For their disobedience the sentence is 
 pronounced upon the serpent that henceforth 
 it shall go on its belly (as if it had walked 
 upright before), and it shall eat dirt; upon 
 the woman the sentence is pronounced that 
 she shall bear children in labor and sorrow, 
 and shall be in subjection to her husband; the 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 29 
 
 man is sentenced to labor for his bread, and 
 the earth is cursed for his sake and made to 
 bring forth thorns and briars from this time 
 on; and death, which we are given to under- 
 stand was not in the world before, and would 
 not otherwise have entered, is now made the 
 doom of the human family. Then Adam and 
 Eve are driven from Paradise, to become the 
 parents of a fallen, sinning, suffering, lost 
 race. Thus the plan of the Creator for a 
 good world, filled with virtue and happiness, 
 is broken down and destroyed at its very 
 inception. 
 
 What shall we say of this story? 
 
 If we found that the Genesis narrative of 
 the creation of the world must be set down 
 as legend or myth or poetry, even more does 
 it seem that this of the creation of man must 
 be set down as the same. Why? Because 
 all its marks appear to be marks of the leg- 
 endary, not of the historic; of the imaginary, 
 not of the real. 
 
 In the real world serpents do not talk. 
 They have never walked upright, but have 
 always crawled on the ground as they do 
 now. Serpents do not live on dirt as food, 
 and never have. The world brought forth 
 thorns and briars long, long before man 
 arrived upon the scene. Death did not begin 
 
30 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 with Adam. It has been in the world untold 
 ages—indeed ever since life appeared upon 
 the planet. Death was a necessity if man or 
 any animal was to have an organized physical 
 body. To sing, as Milton does, of 
 “the fruit 
 
 Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste 
 
 Brought death into our world and ali our woe,” 
 may be admissible for a poet, but it has no 
 relation to fact. It is a mistake to think of 
 labor as a curse. Excessive labor is a curse— 
 as excessive anything else is; but labor in 
 itself is a great blessing. As to the subjection 
 of woman to man, it has to be confessed that 
 there has been a great deal too much of such 
 slavery in all ages of the world; but it is not 
 a necessary condition of things, and certainly 
 it is not one which we have a right to charge 
 upon God as his decree. That woman was 
 created out of a rib of man, there is no’ 
 reason whatever to believe. Every scientist 
 will deny the possibility of such a thing. How- 
 ever man was created, woman was certainly 
 created in the same way. Nothing could be 
 more unhistoric and unscientific in its very 
 nature than the whole Genesis story of the 
 creation of man and woman, and of the events 
 connected with it. Everywhere in the story 
 there are clear marks of legend, of myth, of 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 31 
 
 the imagination; nowhere do we find marks 
 of historic fact. 
 
 One of the greatest difficulties connected 
 with the Genesis story of the creation of man 
 is found in the matter of time. It has already 
 been shown that the age of the world must be 
 accepted, not as the six thousand years which 
 the Bible record allows, but as millions, per- 
 haps hundreds of millions, of years. The time 
 during which man has been in existence is of 
 course short compared with the whole period 
 since the creation of the earth, and yet it is 
 vastly longer than the biblical record con- 
 templates. 
 
 Assyriologists have been for some time in 
 possession of definite records showing that 
 a powerful kingdom, under the rule of Sargon 
 I and his son Naram-Sin, existed in the 
 Valley of the Kuphrates, and extended as far 
 as the Mediterranean Sea on the west, at as 
 early a date as 8750 or 3800 years before 
 Christ. This is many centuries before Noah’s 
 flood, and within two centuries of the creation 
 of the world and of the first man, if we are 
 to take the common Bible chronology. Pro- 
 fessor McCurdy, in his scholarly and candid 
 work, “History, Prophecy, and the Monu- 
 ments,” places the date of the founding of 
 the cities of Erech and Ur, in Babylonia, at 
 
32 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 5000 years B. C., and the date of the first 
 agricultural settlements in the lower Eu- 
 phrates valley at 7000 B. c. Professor Hil- 
 precht, of the University of Pennsylvania, 
 who has been connected with some of the 
 most fruitful excavations, at Nippon and 
 elsewhere, that have been made in recent 
 years, has found writings on clay tablets 
 which he claims cannot be of a date later 
 than 6000 B. c., and he is of the opinion that 
 the development of such a system of writing 
 as was used could not have taken place in 
 less than three thousand years. This would 
 carry us back to 9000 B. c., or a time five 
 thousand years earlier than the date of the 
 creation printed in the margin of our Bibles. 
 
 Turning from the valley of the Euphrates 
 to the valley of the Nile, what do we find? 
 The earliest reliable Egyptian history may 
 be said to begin with Menes, the first king 
 who united the different provinces of Egypt 
 into an empire. What is the date of Menes? | 
 Broeck says 5702 B.c.; Unger 5613, Mari- 
 ette, 5004; Brugsch, 4455. The weight of 
 authority fixes it at 5000 B.c. or earlier. 
 But that was not the beginning of human life 
 in Egypt. At that time there was an ad- 
 vanced civilization. In various parts of 
 Egypt pottery and flint implements have been 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 33 
 
 discovered, coming from peoples inhabiting 
 the Nile valley long before the civilized 
 Egyptians had an _ existence. Professor 
 Flinders Petrie (and there is no _ higher 
 authority) says that these discoveries take 
 us back at least nine thousand years, and 
 perhaps very much farther. Maspero, in his 
 great work, “The Dawn of Civilization: 
 Egypt and Chaldea,” says that civilization 
 in the Nile valley is at least fifteen thousand 
 years old; and he believes the culture of 
 Babylonia to have been earlier still. 
 
 The time required for the development of 
 the languages of the world also takes us back 
 very far. Professor McCurdy says it is im- 
 possible to believe that the Arabic language, 
 the oldest of the Semitic tongues, had its 
 origin less than fifteen thousand years ago. 
 But probably Semitic in all its forms is com- 
 paratively recent. There is reason to believe 
 that man existed vast periods of time before 
 any of the languages now known had their 
 birth. 
 
 It is not, however, until we go to geology 
 that we get the earliest traces of man. These 
 traces are in the form of teeth, skulls, or 
 other human bones, and especially of imple- 
 ments of various kinds, crudely shaped out of 
 flint or other hard stone. Such traces have 
 
34 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 been discovered in England, in nearly all 
 parts of western, central, and southern 
 Europe, in northern Africa, in western and 
 southern Asia, and in various places in 
 America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 
 And in many places they are found in such 
 circumstances that by means of deposits 
 formed above them, or alteration of sea or 
 land levels, or other geological changes that 
 have taken place since they were buried, it 
 is possible to ascertain with considerable cer- 
 tainty their age. They go back far into the 
 glacial epoch, if not to preglacial times. The 
 northwest of Europe seems to have been 
 peopled with these early men for thousands 
 of years. At that time the climate was sub- 
 tropical. Such flora as we now see in Italy 
 and northern Africa extended nearly up to the 
 arctic circle, and the elephant, the hyena, and 
 the leopard lived in Britain, which was at 
 that time joined to the mainland of Europe. 
 Then came great glaciers which pushed their 
 ice-mantles down far into Germany in 
 Europe, and to Philadelphia in America. At 
 the close of this period (or these periods) 
 of cold and ice, the earliest men, sometimes 
 known as Drift-men, had disappeared, and 
 another race known as the Cave-men had 
 taken their place. How far back does this 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 35 
 
 carry the earliest traces we have of man? 
 Very conservative estimates say from fifty 
 thousand to one hundred thousand years. 
 Quatrefages says one hundred thousand 
 years. Professor F. W. Putnam thinks the 
 evidence clear that early man in North 
 America was contemporary with the mam- 
 moth. Dr. Draper says it is difficult to assign 
 to the beginning of the glacial epoch a later 
 date than a quarter of a million years ago. 
 Mr. Croll, from his astronomical calculations, 
 puts it at two hundred and forty thousand 
 years ago. Mr. John Fiske, after making a 
 careful and extended examination of the evi- 
 dence bearing on the subject, agrees with 
 Mr. Croll. The dates assigned to the Cro- 
 Magnon Man, the Neanderthal Man and the 
 Ape-Man of Java are respectively 25,000 
 years, 25,000 to 40,000 years, and 500,000 
 years. 
 
 Another thing about primitive man is as 
 important as his early origin. It is his con- 
 dition. What do we find the first human 
 being to be? Is he a perfect man, living in a 
 Paradise? And are we to regard all his 
 subsequent condition on the earth as fallen 
 and degenerate, compared with his first 
 state? 
 
 On the contrary, we find the earliest man 
 
36 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 to be very low down in every way, lacking 
 even the rudiments of civilization, without 
 house, or arts, or clothing, or fire—in mode 
 of life or power over nature hardly above the 
 beasts, and with a skull nearer to that of the 
 anthropoid apes than to the skull of the civil- 
 ized man of to-day. The change that has 
 taken place in his condition since the far- 
 away time when we first get trace of him 
 has been one, not of degeneration, but of 
 marvelous progress. 
 
 So, then, our inquiries as to how long man 
 has been in existence, and what was his con- 
 dition when we first discover him, bring us 
 two results: first, they show us, beyond all 
 possibility of question, that the Genesis 
 stories of his creation and fall are legendary 
 and not historic; and second, they prepare 
 the way for the evolutionist’s theory of man’s 
 origin, and go far toward compelling us to 
 accept that theory. If Evolution is true, 
 where ought we to find our first traces of 
 man? Far back in the past, somewhere near 
 where we do find them. If Evolution is true, 
 what ought man’s condition to be when we 
 first discover him? Just what we do find it 
 —a condition only a little above that of some 
 other forms of animal life. 
 
 Now to these facts, add the facts, still more 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 37 
 
 significant, brought to light by the compara- 
 tive anatomist, showing the close connection 
 of man’s body structurally with the animals 
 below him. Says Professor Le Conte: 
 
 “Tt is impossible to exaggerate the closeness be- 
 tween man’s body and the animal kingdom from 
 a structural point of view. . .. Man’s body is 
 identified with the body of all animals in its func- 
 tions; with all vertebrates, especially mammals, in 
 its structure. Bone for bone, muscle for muscle, 
 ganglion for ganglion, almost nerve-fibre for nerve- 
 fibre, his body corresponds with that of the higher 
 animals. Whether he was derived from such ani- 
 mals or not, certain it is that his structure, even in 
 the minutest details, is precisely such as it would be 
 if he were thus derived by successive slight mod- 
 ifications,’’! 
 
 “All the back-boned mammals are constructed on 
 one general pattern; man, monkey, deer, horse, 
 whale, are all outgrowths of one idea—two pairs of 
 limbs joined to a skelton that has within it a battery 
 of nerves, and at one end of the column a collo- 
 cation of nerves in a bony case, serving as a seat of 
 sensation and dominant perception. Man simply has 
 a larger brain, and his forelimbs free, while he rises 
 to walk on two feet.’ 
 
 Note, with the rest, the remarkable fact 
 that the embryo of the human infant in its 
 development actually passes through stages 
 of close_similarity to every successive form 
 
 1 Evolution and its Relation to Religious Thought, p. 287. 
 2 E. P. Powell, Heredity from God, p. 151. 
 
38 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 of animal life—beginning with the lowest 
 and simplest, and advancing up through re- 
 semblance to those of fish, reptiles, birds, 
 lower mammals, last of all apes, then the true 
 human. What a suggestion have we here 
 that man’s life-path on the earth has been a 
 development up through all the lower forms; 
 and that this embryo development in every 
 individual human being is nature’s way of 
 remembering the long path the race has 
 travelled to reach its present place at the top 
 of the ladder of the world’s physical life! — 
 
 It is very suggestive, too, that “the human 
 being who degenerates moves directly back 
 towards the ape in form. The idiot has a 
 retreating forehead, prominent teeth, claw- 
 like hands, and sometimes even a hairy body. 
 His language is an ape-like chatter, and his 
 anger a scream, almost exactly that of a. 
 monkey in the forest. | 
 
 “The case is not different with wild races. 
 Their foreheads are retreating; their bodies © 
 covered with hair; their language simian; 
 their eyebrows flexible, and eyes restless; 
 abdomen protruding, and arms longer in pro- 
 portion than any civilized races.” 
 
 Thus the lower down we go, and the 
 farther back, the nearer we find man approx- 
 imating the forms of animal life below him. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 39 
 
 Now put all these lines of evidence together 
 (and there are many more that I cannot even 
 touch), and it is very plain why scientists 
 have come to hold with almost absolute 
 unanimity that physical man, at least, is the 
 result of an evolutionary process from lower 
 forms of animal existence. 
 
 Nor is the evolution believed to be confined 
 to the physical. It seems to extend to the 
 psychical also. 
 
 There is hardly a mental faculty in man 
 that is not found, at least in germ, in the 
 lower animals. Stories of the intelligence of 
 animals might easily be told by the hour. 
 Horses have been trained to perform remark- 
 able feats, involving counting, and much else. 
 Sir John Lubbock taught his dog to read— 
 that is, to distinguish printed words from 
 each other, bringing a card containing the 
 word ‘“‘water’” when he wanted to drink, one 
 - containing the word “meat” when he wanted 
 food, and so on. 
 
 It seems plain that animals may be taught 
 right and wrong. A dog will often show by 
 his actions as plainly as words could speak it, 
 that he is conscious that he has done some 
 wrong thing, and is ashamed of it. 
 
 Fidelity is often manifested by animals in 
 a very high degree. A family went away 
 
40 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION - 
 
 from home leaving their dog shut up in the 
 cellar, to remain there during their absence. 
 They carried to him before their departure 
 a piece of meat for his food during the time. 
 On returning, in ten days or so, they found 
 the dog dead, starved to death, and the meat 
 by his side untouched. He had been accus- 
 tomed to watching meat, and other things, 
 and evidently had understood that this meat 
 was given him to watch. So he died rather 
 than disobey or be unfaithful to his trust. 
 The affection of animals is often very deep 
 and strong. Any one who has seen Land- 
 seer’s touching and powerful picture, “‘The 
 Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner,” will never 
 doubt this. In the city of Edinburgh, Scot- 
 land, they show travellers a monument which 
 the people there erected some years ago to 
 a dog. The dog’s master had died. The dog 
 followed the lifeless form to the grave and 
 would not go away. No inducement could 
 draw him from the sacred spot where his — 
 master lay. By and by a butcher in the 
 neighborhood took pity on him and fed him. 
 At last the dog so far yielded as to go once 
 a day at a certain hour to the shop of the 
 friendly butcher, to get his allowance; but 
 no sooner was he through eating then he 
 would return again to his charge. And he 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 4] 
 
 passed the rest of his life—some years— 
 guarding the grave of the one he loved. So 
 touched were the people of the neighborhood 
 by such affection that when the dog died they 
 joined, rich and poor together, in building 
 him a monument. 
 
 These illustrations show how closely con- 
 nected we are with the forms of life below 
 us, both on the physical, and on the psychical 
 sides. Psychical evolution is much more mys- 
 terious and difficult to explain than evolution 
 of the body, but everything indicates that 
 evolution is the law, not of one half, but of 
 the whole of man’s nature. 
 
 I do not wish to be misunderstood by this 
 to contend that there is little difference be- 
 tween man and the lower animals, or no 
 difference except in degree. Evolution as 
 expounded by its greatest masters does not 
 teach this. It teaches that there are deep 
 -and radical differences. Let us note what 
 some of them are. 
 
 First, there are differences in bodily struc- 
 ture, which are of immense significance. Man 
 stands upright, as no brute does. Thus he is 
 by nature a forward looker and an upward 
 looker. This has vast consequences. Yet 
 this upright position has been attained by 
 an evolutionary process. He has a true hand 
 
42 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 —something which no animal below him pos- 
 
 ‘ gesses. The hand is the most wonderful of 
 
 mechanical instruments, and itself goes far 
 toward giving man dominance over all other 
 creatures. Yet his hand is simply the highest 
 and most perfect form of that development 
 which has given the fish its fins and the quad- 
 ruped its forepaws. Man has a brain which 
 by its capacity and quality crowns him king 
 of the world. Yet everything shows that his 
 brain has developed and enlarged and grown 
 complex and superior to all other brains by 
 degrees and through long use. vs 
 Some have held that the radical difference 
 between man and the lower animals is found 
 in language. And it must be confessed that 
 the difference here is very great. No animal 
 below man has developed a real language. 
 But we must go to mind before we find the 
 deepest distinction of all. It is man’s mind 
 that makes him king and lord over all other 
 created beings on earth. | 
 And yet even this does not make the dis- 
 tinction quite clear. We must ask where in 
 mind does the essential difference lie, since 
 certain mental qualities, and even germs of 
 qualities which we may call moral, we have 
 already discovered in brute animals. 
 Nearly all the most competent investiga- 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 43 
 
 tors agree in drawing the line of distinction 
 between the human mind and the brute mind 
 at self-consciousness. The lower animals are 
 conscious; but we have every reason to be- 
 lieve they are not self-conscious. They have 
 not become self-centred personalities. This 
 is attained only with self-consciousness. In 
 the lower animal, there is what we may call 
 the anima, or animal soul. But it is incom- 
 plete, imperfect, unstable. In man it rises 
 to completeness, stability, self-centredness, 
 full individuality, personality. Self-con- 
 sciouness seems to be the simplest and clear- 
 est sign of personality. Its appearance 
 among psychic phenomena marks spirit birth. 
 We may imagine men to have emerged ever 
 so gradually from animals; but in this 
 process of gradual development the moment 
 he becomes conscious of self, that moment 
 the real man is born. The moment he be- 
 - comes, not simply conscious, but conscious 
 that he ts conscious; the moment he not 
 simply knows, but knows that he knows; 
 that is to say, the moment he turns his 
 thoughts inward in attention and wonder 
 upon himself, and on the mystery of his exist- 
 ence as separate from nature, that moment 
 marks the birth of humanity out of animality. 
 All else characteristic of man follows as a 
 
44 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 necessary consequence. He is now a person, 
 a self-acting ego. He has now free-will, and 
 real moral responsibility. Out of these grow 
 the recognition of relations to other moral 
 beings and to God, and therefore ethics and 
 religion. Out of these grows, also, the capa- 
 city for indefinite voluntary progress. This 
 also means full spirit life, and therefore, as I 
 believe, immortality.’ 
 
 In the early years of Evolution there used 
 to be much talk among its opponents about 
 the degradation it puts upon man. But how 
 degradation? Are the most developed: and 
 the most intelligent of the animals lower 
 down than the dust’ of the ground, out of 
 which the Genesis story represents Adam as 
 created? If we had always been taught that 
 God created man by development from the 
 highest animals, that would certainly have 
 seemed to us a far nobler and less objection- 
 able origin than creation out of dirt. Surely, 
 if Evolution is true, God has brought us into 
 being by the most exalted of all possible 
 paths. He has kindled our lives from a 
 torch that has been lighted at a well-nigh 
 infinite cost—lighted by all the life that has 
 been lived on the globe in all the ages past.. 
 We are the consummation and crown of the 
 
 1 See Le Conte, p. 302 et seq. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 45 
 
 life-history of the planet. What conceivable 
 origin could be more exalted or honorable 
 than this? 
 
 I have sometimes dreamed the wild dream 
 of being an eagle, and living an eagle’s life, 
 up amidst the storms, the clouds, the moun- 
 tain peaks, the lightnings. And again I have 
 dreamed of being a deer roaming free in 
 the woods; a skylark singing in the clouds; 
 a fish in the sea; a lion in the desert; a wild 
 horse on the plains; a polar bear on his 
 lonely ice fields; a chamois amid the Alps; 
 a humming-bird or a butterfly among the 
 flowers—and living the different and won- 
 derful lives of all these. If Evolution is true, 
 these dreams come nearer than I may suppose 
 to realization. In me something of the lives 
 and natures of all these, and of all forms of 
 existence below me, actually survives and 
 lives. 
 
 Edwin Markham, in his poem “The Making 
 of Abraham Lincoln,” gives striking ex- 
 pression to the thought of the vital affinity 
 between nature and man. He sees all the 
 lower forces of nature gathered up as it were 
 into the great President, the great man of the 
 people, to make him what he was: 
 
 “The color of the ground was in him, the red earth; 
 The tang and color of the primal things— 
 
46 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 The rectitude and patience of the rocks; 
 
 The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn; 
 The courage of the bird that dares the sea; 
 The justice of the rain that loves all leaves; 
 The pity of the snow that hides all scars; 
 The loving kindness of the way-side well;. 
 The tolerance and equity of light 
 
 That gives as freely to the shrinking weed 
 As to the great oak flaring to the wind— 
 
 To the grave’s low hill as to the Matterhorn 
 That shoulders out the sky.” 
 
 We little realize the rich heritage that 
 comes to us all from the past. We sometimes 
 sing the hymn, ‘Heir of all the ages, I.” All 
 the eons of time have been at work shaping 
 and fashioning the globe, its mountains, its 
 valleys, its continents, its seas, its skies, its 
 seasons, its climates, to make it a fit home for 
 man. All the life-forces of the globe have 
 been busy preparing a life for man. Man 
 gathers all the kingdoms of the world up into 
 himself. Well may he sing with Boyesen: 
 
 “T am the child of earth and air and sea! 
 My lullaby by hoarse silurian storms 
 Was chanted: and through endless changing 
 forms 
 Of plant, and bird, and beast, unceasingly 
 The toiling ages wrought to fashion me. 
 Lo, these large ancestors have left a breath 
 Of their strong souls in mine, defying death, 
 And change. I grow and blossom as the tree, 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 47 
 
 And ever feel the deep-delving earthly roots 
 Binding me daily to the common clay; 
 But with its airy impulse upward shoots 
 My life into the realm of light and day. 
 And thou, O sea, stern mother of my soul, 
 Thy tempests sing in me, thy billows roll. 
 Within the rose a pulse that answered mine 
 (Though hushed and silently its life-tide ran) 
 I oft have felt; but when with joy divine 
 I hear the song thrush warbling in my brain, 
 I glory in this vast creation’s chain.” 
 
 So inconceivably splendid a heritage, pre- 
 pared by the marvellous and unsleeping ev- 
 olution of the past, do we all find awaiting us, 
 when we arrive on the earthly scene. 
 
 Man degraded by evolution? No poet’s 
 fancy ever dreamed such exaltation for man 
 as science in our day, in the light of Evolu- 
 tion, is declaring to be verified fact. Well 
 may Emerson exclaim: “O rich and various 
 Man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying 
 in thy senses the morning and the night and 
 the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the 
 geometry of the City of God; in thy heart, 
 the bower of love and the realm of right and 
 wrong! An individual man is a fruit which 
 it cost all the foregoing ages to form and 
 ripen. A cultivated man, wise to know and 
 bold to perform, is the end to which Nature 
 works, and the education of the will is the 
 
48 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 flowering and result of all geology and as- 
 tronomy.”’ | 
 
 The doubter says, “Yes, all this sounds 
 very well; but in fact it is hollow and empty, 
 because there is no God in it.” No God in 
 it? What is Evolution? Perhaps no better 
 or more widely accepted definition has been 
 given than this: “Evolution is continuous, 
 progressive change according to definite laws 
 and by means of resident forces.” But what 
 are laws, if they are not the methods of 
 operation of God, the Infinite Wisdom and 
 Power? And what are resident forces, but 
 God the Infinite and Eternal Energy at the 
 heart of all things? To talk of Evolution 
 without God is like talking of wind without 
 
 ‘Jt 
 
 air, waves without a sea, light without the we 
 
 sun or the ether, effect without cause. The 
 truth is, no other conception that ever enter- 
 ed into the mind of man is so full of God as 
 Evolution. You cannot find a pin-point of 
 all the eternity-long and universe-wide ev- 
 olutionary process where God is not. Not 
 until you can expel law from Evolution, and 
 resident forces from Evolution, can you ex- 
 pel God from Evolution. 
 
 Too much emphasis cannot be placed upon 
 the fact that the creation of man is not yet 
 completed. As Tennyson sings: 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 49 
 
 “Where is one that, born of woman, altogether can 
 escape 
 
 From the lower world within him, moods of tiger 
 or of ape? 
 
 Man as yet is being made, and, ere the crowning 
 Age of ages, 
 
 Shall not xon after won pass, and touch him into 
 shape? 
 
 All about him shadow still; but, while the races 
 flower and fade, 
 
 Prophet eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on 
 the shade, 
 
 Till the peoples all are one, all their voices blend 
 in choric 
 
 Hallelujah to the Maker, ‘It is finished! Man is 
 made!’ ” 
 
 I have already pointed out that worlds are in 
 process of creation in the heavens above us, 
 and that on the earth also the creative 
 _ process is still going forward on a vast scale. 
 So man is not yet fully man. He is only in 
 the process of being created. Even his body 
 has not reached anything like that perfection 
 of health and strength, and that degree of 
 longevity, which it ought to reach, and will! 
 reach sometime, when he learns to obey the 
 holy laws of life and health which wrap him 
 about. 
 
 But still further below the possibilities of 
 
50 EVOLUTION AND RKELIGION 
 
 his nature does he fall in things intellectual 
 and especially moral. Here what poor, poor 
 fragments of men the best of us are! Our 
 faculties are only half formed. Our char- 
 acters are scarcely more than the embryo of 
 what they ought to be. In so many respects . 
 we are only babes where we ought to be men! 
 We look upon the savage with pity, and ex- 
 claim, “How far the development process 
 must go on before he can reach full civiliza- 
 tion or full manhood!” But how far are 
 most of us from full civilization, judged by 
 any worthy standards! And how very far 
 from manhood at its best, even such manhood 
 as has been exemplified in many actual lives! 
 Our true work in the world is that of co- 
 operating with one another, and all good men, 
 and all regenerating forces around us, and 
 with God, to carry on and ever on the work 
 of spiritual creation, in ourselves, in society, 
 and in the world. It is the work of strug- 
 gling upward by every means in our power, 
 and helping others to do the same, from the 
 brute beast, which is our starting-point, to- 
 ward the angel, the free, pure, strong son of 
 God, which is our goal. 
 
 Evolution opens up a wholly new outlook 
 for mankind. It antagonizes the old theology 
 at almost every point; but most does it an- 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 51 
 
 tagonize it in connection with the doctrine 
 of the fall of the race in Adam. That dark, 
 horrible nightmare of the Christian world 
 it sweeps utterly away, replacing it with a 
 faith as full of light and hope as it is possible 
 for man to conceive. 
 
 If man came into the world by an ev- 
 olutionary process from lower forms of life, 
 and as long ago as science indicates, then 
 there was no such Adam as the Genesis leg- 
 end portrays, and consequently no serpent 
 and no fall. What have we instead? Ev- 
 olution gives us a world unfallen. It gives 
 us a race which has been rising, with stand- 
 stills and even set-backs here and there, yet 
 on the whole rising, from the beginning until 
 now, and which is rising still. It places Eden 
 not in the past, but in the future—before 
 man as an ideal and a goal, to beckon him 
 on to forever better things. Instead of a 
 plan of God for the world which broke down 
 in the first act, and required to be mended as 
 best it might be, by a scheme for saving a 
 remnant of the race from the world-wreck, 
 Evolution gives us a divine plan which has 
 never been thwarted and never can be, but 
 which is marching on through the ages with 
 ever enlarging results of good to all man- 
 kind. 
 
52 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 “The rise, not the fall, of the race is the wholesome 
 belief of to-day. 
 
 Onward and upward, from darkness to light, from 
 the slime of the past, 
 
 From the animal heritage slowly yet surely emerg- 
 ing at last, 
 
 From the cave, from the chase, into fostering home, 
 from war into peace, 
 
 From tribes into nations, where law and religion 
 and knowledge increase, 
 
 Where in commerce, in culture of fields and of 
 flocks, in art and in song, 
 
 In faith and in fellowship blended, in justice and 
 hatred of wrong, 
 
 All agencies, human, divine, with gathering wisdom 
 unite 
 
 To lift the dim ages beyond their past into glory 
 and light, 
 
 Till the nations are born in the power of a heavenly 
 birth, 
 
 And the kingdom of God descends and embraces 
 the ends of the earth.” 
 
 Such is the modern doctrine of Evolution 
 in its bearing upon man’s nature and destiny, 
 as contrasted with the old theological doc- 
 trine of a fallen race. The old is a doctrine 
 of despair; the new is a doctrine of infinite 
 hope. The old faces men to the past, the 
 new faces men to the future. The old tells 
 the world of a Paradise lost, the new sings 
 forever of a Paradise to be gained. Judge, 
 then, which is the more honoring to God; and 
 judge which is the more worthy of accept- 
 ance by thoughtful and reverent minds. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 
 
 WE have thus far found both the world and 
 man coming into existence by the process of 
 Evolution. If we could carry on our study 
 so as to make it cover man’s history on the 
 earth, we should find the law of Evolution 
 applying to nearly or quite all of that history. 
 Man’s first dwelling was a cave, his next was 
 a rude hut of unhewn stones or of bark. 
 From such low and rude beginnings have 
 come the palaces and homes of to-day. 
 
 Man’s first clothing was probably leaves, 
 grasses, and skins of animals. Everything 
 better has been reached by a slow, gradual, 
 evolutionary process. 
 
 At first man’s food was doubtless eaten 
 raw. It was a great event in his onward 
 career when he learned to kindle and to make 
 use of fire. From this beginning came the 
 evolution, through thousands of years, of the 
 art of cooking. 
 
 Man’s first weapons for hunting and war 
 were doubtless stones and clubs; from these 
 the path has been a very long one to the 
 
54 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 hunting-rifle and the machine-gun of to-day. 
 Tools and utensils of all kinds have come into 
 existence by a very slow and gradual process. 
 Primitive agriculture was only digging the 
 earth with a stick in favorable spots, and 
 dropping in seeds to take care of themselves. 
 
 The family and the domestic relations of 
 men have been a development. So have 
 government, civil society, and the State. The 
 origin of speech was doubtless gradual, and 
 the history of every language reveals con- 
 stant change, usually growth. It took man 
 thousands of years to invent an alphabet. 
 Mathematics has been an evolution; so has 
 been art; so all the sciences. Indeed every- 
 thing pertaining to man and civilization in 
 the world finds its place under the law of 
 Evolution, with one possible exception. What 
 is that? It is religion. 
 
 There are those who would draw a line at 
 religion, and say, ‘‘Here Evolution cannot be 
 admitted. Religion is something sui generis, 
 special, miraculous. To give religion a place 
 in the natural order is to destroy it.” 
 
 This is the question which I purpose now 
 to take up. Shall we give religion a place 
 in the evolutionary process? If not, why not? 
 If so, what is the effect? Is religion thereby 
 destroyed? Is itinjured? On the other hand, 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION sts) 
 
 by being put thus into harmony with the rest 
 of man’s life, is it not given new dignity 
 and credibility? Is it not thus made more 
 certainly a part of the great divine order? 
 
 Religion must have come into the world 
 either naturally and by an evolutionary proc- 
 cess, as art came, and knowledge, and lan- 
 guage, and civilization, and man himself, or it 
 must have come suddenly, at some given time, 
 and in some miraculous, supernatural way, 
 unlike anything else. 
 
 If we claim that it came at some fixed 
 time and miraculously, in what direction shall 
 we look to find the time, the place, and the 
 source? 
 
 Many answer by pointing to the Bible. 
 But why to the Bible, rather than to some 
 of the other great sacred books of the world? 
 If we were in India and inquired for the 
 source of religion, we should be pointed just 
 as confidently to the Vedas and the Shastyras, 
 as we are pointed in this country to the Old 
 and New Testaments. If we were among the 
 Parsees we should be pointed just as con- 
 fidently to the writings of Zoroaster; or 
 among the Mohammedans, to the Koran of 
 Mahomet. But from all these claims that 
 the source of religion is in sacred books other 
 than our own, we instantly dissent. Do we 
 
56 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 dissent with any clearer or stronger reasons 
 for so doing, than the Hindu, the Parsee, or 
 the Mohammedan dissents from our claim? 
 Is it not probable that all of us make our 
 respective claims for our own sacred book 
 rather as the result of our own natural preju- 
 dices than of intelligence on the subject? If 
 we could get rid of the bias which education 
 and environment have given us, and see things 
 as they really are, we should discover that 
 religion cannot have its source in any book. 
 A book may be a valuable conserver, but it 
 cannot be a creator. It may be a reservoir of 
 religious knowledge and thought, and as such 
 very important; but to find the fountain, 
 must we not go to the human soul, where 
 alone God ever reveals himself first-hand? 
 The Bible nowhere claims that it is the source 
 of religion. On the contrary, it makes it 
 very plain that religion long preceded the 
 Bible. Not only was there religion among the 
 Jewish people before any part of the Bible 
 was written, but there was religion all around 
 about Palestine, much of which was recog- 
 nized by the biblical writers as true and good. 
 
 It is by no means certain that Job was a 
 Jew, and yet he is counted among the Old 
 Testament worthies, and the Book of Job has 
 an honored place in the Bible. Balaam was 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 57 
 
 not a Jew; he came from the far East, prob- 
 ably from beyond the Euphrates; and yet he 
 is set down as a true prophet of God. Ruth, 
 who occupies an honored place among the 
 ancestors of David and Jesus, was a Moabi- 
 tess, nota Jew. Melchizedek, one of the most 
 exalted characters of the Old Testament, who 
 is represented as a priest of the most high 
 God, and to whom even Abraham looked up 
 as a superior, seems not to have been a Jew. 
 Jesus said of the Roman centurion that he 
 had “not found so great faith, no, not in 
 Israel.”’ Instead of true religion being con- 
 fined to the Jews, Jesus declared: ‘‘Many 
 shall come from the East and West, and shal! 
 sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob 
 in the kingdom of heaven.” Paul told the 
 Greeks at Athens that they were “very de- 
 vout,” and quoted with approval a religious 
 utterance of one of their poets. At Lystra 
 he declared that God “hath not left himself 
 without witness” among any people. Peter 
 declared to the Roman Cornelius, “In every 
 nation he that feareth God and worketh 
 righteousness is accepted with him.” It is 
 clear that, according to the Bible itself, re- 
 ligion—and religion which is true and ac- 
 ceptable to God—is not confined to the 
 Jewish people, or to the Old or New Testa- 
 
58 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 ment scriptures, or even to persons who 
 received their religious instruction from 
 these scriptures. The teaching of the Bible 
 is essentially the same as that which has 
 been so well expressed by Whittier: 
 
 “All souls that struggle and aspire, 
 All hearts of prayer by Thee are lit; 
 
 And, dim or clear, thy tongues of fire 
 On dusky tribes and twilight centuries sit. 
 
 Nor bounds, nor clime, nor creed Thou know’st, 
 Wide as man’s need Thy favors fall; 
 
 The white wings of the Holy Ghost 
 Stoop, seen or unseen, o’er the heads of all.” . 
 
 There are those who assert that God made 
 a primitive revelation to Adam and Eve in 
 the Garden of Eden, and that whatever true 
 religion there was or is in the world, previous 
 to or outside of Judaism and Christianity, 
 came through that. But we have only to 
 read the Garden of Eden story to see that 
 nothing whatever is said there of any such 
 primitive revelation. The theory is a pure: 
 invention of a later time. Moreover, how 
 could such a revelation have been made to 
 a pair of children who did not know good 
 from evil? Or, if it had been made, how 
 could it have been handed down? But the ob- 
 jection which makes every other superfluous, 
 is the fact which I have already demonstrat- 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 59 
 
 ed, that there was no Adam, no Eve, and no 
 Eden. The Genesis narrative is simply leg- 
 end, poetry, a creation of the imagination of 
 some devout soul, and not a historic record 
 at all. Hence, to found a theory of a prim- 
 itive revelation upon it is simply to build an 
 edifice upon a dream. 
 
 Where, then, did religion come from? 
 Plainly it came into the world with man. It 
 is a part of man’s life. It was born out of 
 the necessary experiences of his soul. It is 
 no more miraculous than is art, or language, 
 or thought, or love. Man could not be a man, 
 in a world of human and divine relations like 
 ours, without being religious. This is God’s 
 world. God has made it. He is in it. That 
 Eternal Energy which is at the heart of it 
 all, the force of its forces, the life of its life, 
 the explanation of its law, the soul of its ev-. 
 olutionary processes—what can that be, but 
 the Eternal God? It is inconceivable that 
 man could live for a thousand centuries in 
 such a world, where God speaks from every 
 blossoming rose, and star of night, and beat 
 of human heart, and not be aware, and not 
 learn to put the shoes from off his feet in 
 the presence of any divine manifestation. 
 
 There is nothing on the earth more natural 
 or more inevitable than that men should be 
 
60 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 worshippers. The statement has sometimes . 
 been made that there are tribes, very low 
 down, that have no religion. Travellers have 
 made this statement. But probably it is a 
 mistake. In every case where full investiga- 
 tion has been made there have been dis- 
 covered germs of what seems to be religious 
 thought and feeling. Man recognizes that 
 he is not the supreme power in this world. 
 He did not place himself here. He can- 
 not sustain himself without much help. There 
 is something above him. Hence we are not 
 surprised to see the rudest savages bowing 
 the head in fear, in awe, in worship. It may 
 be that what they bow to is only “a stock 
 or a stone.” But it represents to their 
 childish thought a mystery, a power, some- 
 thing higher than themselves. Among savage 
 and barbarous peoples religion is necessarily 
 crude and superstitious. It rises as man 
 rises. Worship becomes more pure as man 
 becomes better able to understand God and 
 his relations to God. Religious forms change, 
 but the religious impulse is permanent. So 
 long as man thinks and feels he must wor- 
 ship. If he ever ceases to worship he will 
 have sunk into a being lower than man. The 
 source of religion is not a book, and cannot 
 be. It is the heart and conscience of man. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 61 
 
 It is God in the human soul. 
 
 Many men sigh for miracles as a basis for 
 religion. They are sighing for the playthings 
 of a child. Man in the child-stage of his 
 development identifies God with the strange, 
 the unusual, that which is out of the order 
 of nature, as if something else could be 
 diviner than nature! As man rises toward 
 maturity of knowledge and thought, he sees 
 that God is in the regular, not in the irregu- 
 lar; in the orderly, not in the disorderly. 
 God is in law, not in the suspension of law. 
 If law could be suspended, it would show 
 God absent not present. As Professor Drum- 
 mond has well pointed out: 
 
 “Those who yield to the temptation to reserve a 
 point here and there for special divine interposition, 
 are apt to forget that this virtually excludes God 
 from the rest of the process. If God appears peri- 
 odically, he disappears periodically. If he comes 
 ‘upon the scene at special crises, he is absent from 
 the scene in the intervals. Whether is all-God 
 or occasional-God the nobler theory? The idea of 
 an immanent God, which is the God of Evolution, is 
 infinitely grander than the occasional wonder-worker 
 who is the God of the old theology.” 
 
 says Martineau: 
 
 “The customs of heaven ought surely to be more 
 sacred in our eyes than its anomalies; the dear old 
 ways, of which the Most High is never tired, than 
 
62 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 the strange things which he oe not love well 
 enough ever to repeat.” 
 
 Writes Lowell: 
 
 “OQ power, more near my life than life itself, 
 If sometimes I must hear good men debate 
 Of other witness of Thyself than Thou,— 
 As if there needed any help of ours 
 To nurse Thy flickering life, that else must cease, 
 Blown out as ’twere a candle, by man’s breath,— - 
 My soul shall not be taken in their snare, 
 To change her inward surety for their doubt, 
 Muffled from sight in formal robes of proofs. 
 While she can only feel herself through thee, | 
 I fear not Thy withdrawal. More I fear, 
 Seeing, to know Thee not, hoodwinked with dreams 
 Of signs and wonders, while unnoticed, Thou, 
 Walking Thy garden still, commun’st with men, 
 Missed in the commonplace of miracle.” 
 
 Men sigh for a divine revelation full-orbed 
 at once—for full knowledge of God and 
 Spiritual things from the beginning. They 
 are sighing for the impossible. The acorn 
 must come before the oak, the babe before 
 the man. Growth is the law of the world in 
 which we live. If man begins on a low plane 
 with other things, he must begin on a low 
 plane with religion. Go to a savage, and 
 try to teach him high ideas of religion. You 
 can no more do it than you can teach him 
 high ideas of art, or science, or philosophy. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 63 
 
 When you have partly civilized him, and 
 given him some degree of intelligence about 
 other matters, then you may give him ad- 
 vanced ideas about religion; not before. So 
 that in the nature of the case the only reve- 
 lation which it was possible for God to make 
 to man, was a gradual and continuous rev- 
 elation from low beginnings. That is exactly 
 what he has made. The evolution of religion 
 in the world has been God’s growing rev- 
 elation of the divine to man and in man, as 
 man has become capable of recognizing it. 
 
 We shall understand better the real sig- 
 nificance of the evolution of religion, if we 
 try to get a little clearer conception than 
 we have yet done of the beginning from 
 which it started. As already intimated, we 
 cannot conceive of a time so far back that 
 man was not conscious of powers around and 
 above him greater than himself, which he 
 could not command and on which his life 
 more or less depended. Storms beat upon 
 him, against which he had little protection; 
 the sun shone upon him, now with genial 
 warmth, and now with deadly heat; wild 
 beasts attacked him and carried away his 
 children; floods swept away his habitation 
 built on the river bank; the avalanche thun- 
 dered down the mountain, destroying without 
 
64 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 mercy all in its path; the seasons marched 
 past him in their order, with their heat and 
 their cold, their abundance and their empti- 
 ness. Accidents came to him that he could 
 not avert, sickness which he could not under- 
 stand, and, strangest of all, death, an enemy 
 with which he could not cope. 
 
 All these things spoke to him of powers 
 mightier than himself, that environed his life, 
 and more or less controlled it. As he was 
 himself a living being, why were not the run- 
 ning river, the restless sea, the sun, the moon, 
 the storm, the avalanche, yes, and the tree 
 that gave him shelter and food, also living 
 beings? With nature all around him so 
 wonderful, so mysterious, so full of hidden 
 energy, so alive, is it strange if he came 
 early to think of all the more striking objects 
 of nature as in a sense divinities, or if his 
 earliest religion was some form of nature- 
 worship? 
 
 But this does not seem to cover the whole 
 ground. From still another source early 
 peoples seem to have obtained ideas of gods 
 and of spirit existence. As men to-day see 
 shadows, so did early men. The tree cast its 
 shadow. Was not that shadow a second tree, 
 a sort of double of the first, a ghost or spirit- 
 tree? Men walking in the sun cast shadows. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 65 
 
 Were not those shadows other selves, spirit- 
 selves? Men looking down into still water 
 saw images of themselves. Were not those 
 images real persons? Men dreamed, and in 
 their dreams saw their friends who had been 
 long dead. Did not this mean that their 
 friends had second selves which did not die? 
 Here, clearly, an early basis was laid for a 
 belief in spirits. And the ability of these 
 spirits to come and go, to appear and to 
 vanish, to pass through the earth or the 
 water or the air at will, as physical bodies 
 could not, seemed to give them a certain 
 superiority, and therefore a claim upon man’s 
 homage. Something like this appears to be 
 the explanation of the origin of that religion 
 of spirit-worship, in its various forms of 
 animism, fetichism, totemism, polydzemon- 
 ism, worship of tutelary deities and of ances- 
 tors, which we see among uncivilized races 
 at the present time, and which, because we 
 see it among uncivilized races to-day, we 
 have a right to believe was essentially the 
 religion of primitive peoples. 
 
 Of course to early man these spirits and 
 nature-powers could have seemed to have 
 little relation to one another. Each was 
 isolated, each was independent. Each had 
 its own habitat or province; generally each 
 
66 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 was associated with some individual object. 
 They might be friendly with one another or 
 they might be hostile. Some were very 
 powerful. Some were relatively weak. Some 
 were good, some were bad. Some were friend- 
 ly to man, some were inimical to man. 
 
 Of course the great thing aimed at by the 
 worshipper was to avert the anger or gain 
 the favor of these spirit powers. He thought 
 to do this in many ways, most often by gifts 
 of food or other things which he supposed 
 the spirits would prize; by making sacrifices, 
 sometimes very heavy and painful, even in- 
 volving human life; or by incantations, the 
 repetition of sacred words, or the perform- 
 ance of certain magical rites, which he be- 
 lieved would give him power over the spirits. 
 
 Something like this was probably the be- 
 ginning of man’s worship and religious life. 
 It is difficult to realize how very crude and 
 low and poor it was. Out of anything so 
 unpromising can there come a religion which © 
 will be high, pure, intelligent, ennobling? 
 Let us not be faithless. The journey will 
 be long, but it will not be so long as more 
 than one that Evolution has already seen 
 accomplished. If the advances from fire- 
 mist to amoeba, and from amoeba, to man, 
 have already been achieved, then surely the 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 67 
 
 advance from this low beginning of religion 
 to the Sermon on the Mount is not incredible. 
 . Let me try to indicate very briefly the 
 path along which the evolution of religion in 
 the world seems to have moved. As to man’s 
 conception of God, it has moved from the 
 narrowly local, first to the tribal, then to 
 the national, and finally to the universal. 
 From that which was very limited in power 
 and wisdom, it has moved slowly to that 
 which was less and less limited, until at last 
 it reached the thought of God as omnipotent 
 and omniscient. From diversity it has moved 
 ever toward unity; that is, from gods many— 
 we may almost say everything a god—it has 
 moved steadily toward the thought of God 
 as one, over all, through all, and in all. From 
 gods without moral character, it has moved 
 on and up to a conception which at last en- 
 dowed the Divine Nature with the highest 
 ethical attributes. Worship, which at first 
 was scarcely more than fear, and selfish 
 desire for protection and for material advan- 
 tage, gradually rose until it became gratitude, 
 love, trust, and adoration of the morally 
 worthy. 
 
 In other words, religion has developed 
 from the lowest and crudest forms of nature 
 worship (or worship of spirits identified with 
 
68 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 natural objects), as seen in animism and 
 fetichism, to polytheism, or the thought of 
 gods more or less distinct from nature and 
 independent; then to higher and higher 
 grades of polytheism, in which the gods be- 
 came more powerful, wholly anthropomor- 
 phic instead of therianthropic, and began to 
 gain moral characteristics then from poly- 
 theism up to the worship of one God alone, 
 but without conceiving of him as universal, 
 or denying the existence of other gods; then 
 to real monotheism, or the belief that there is 
 only one God; and, finally, to ethical mono- 
 theism, or ethical theism, or Christianity 
 which conceives of God as infinite in power 
 and wisdom and possessed of all moral per- 
 fections. Thus we have the culmination of 
 all in the thought of God as one and holy, 
 whose worship is the pure heart, and es- 
 pecially in the thought of God as the Univer- 
 sal Father, whose worship and whose service 
 are love. Higher than this, man’s thought of © 
 God, and of man’s relations to God, cannot 
 rise. Here is the white summit which kisses 
 heaven. 
 
 Now what has caused all this splendid 
 growth of man’s conception of the Power 
 above him? Has the evolution been an 
 accident? It has been no more an accident 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 69 
 
 than man himself has been an accident. It 
 has been no more an accident than God is 
 an accident. Given a rational mind unfold- 
 ing in a universe full of God, as this is, and 
 to such a conception of God sooner or later 
 it must come, because such a conception is 
 true. The universe declares it true, and the 
 universe cannot lie. This conception of God 
 the universe has written on man’s soul; nay, 
 this conception God himself has graven on 
 man’s soul, with a graver’s chisel which has 
 been nothing less than all man’s experience 
 on the earth—experience in the midst of an 
 environment from no atom or pulse-beat of 
 which God has ever for one moment been 
 absent. 
 
 But religion has to do with more than 
 man’s relations to God. We live in a world 
 of human relations, as well as divine, and 
 these too, religion must concern itself with. 
 Has there been an evolution here also? 
 
 Plainly yes. Everything shows that man 
 began his history in the world with well-nigh 
 as imperfect conceptions of his duties and 
 relations to his fellow-men, as to God. Just 
 emerging as he was from the brute life below 
 him, the appetites, propensities, and passions 
 which characterized that brute life were 
 clinging tightly to him. The long climb 
 
70 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 which was before him, from the animal to 
 the complete man, far off and far up, beyond 
 his sight—how long and hard a climb it 
 was to be! But he entered upon it. A 
 thousand times he fell; but he rose again. 
 A thousand times he took the wrong path, 
 often wandering far, but at last he found the 
 right way once more. Many a time he went 
 back, losing precious ground that he had 
 gained. But at last his better, stronger, 
 diviner self prevailed, and he pressed on 
 again. Years passed into centuries, and 
 centuries into millenniums; he was still ad- 
 vancing; his face was still toward the 
 heights. We can now see what he has achieved. 
 
 He has learned something of what right 
 means. He has learned something of what 
 justice means, and duty and kindness. He is 
 beginning to learn not to steal; for if he 
 steals from his neighbor, his neighbor will 
 steal from him; and thus all his possessions, 
 such as he has, become insecure. He is be- 
 ginning to learn not to kill, but to respect 
 human life—otherwise there is no security 
 for his own life. He is beginning to learn, 
 by experience long and dearly purchased, that 
 truth is better than falsehood. By erperience 
 not less long, and much of it not less bitter, 
 he is beginning to learn that marriage is 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 71 
 
 better than promiscuity, and chastity than 
 unbridled lust. Parental love and love for 
 wife and friends have come into his soul. 
 They are crude and poor yet, but they are 
 clearly there, and they give promise of some- 
 thing very beautiful. Germs of pity and 
 gentleness, of fidelity and truth, of nobleness 
 and honor, and all the high moral qualities 
 which will one day make human society a 
 kingdom of heaven, are growing within him. 
 He is yet far from the angel; but thank God, 
 he is also far from the brute. And so he 
 struggles on and up, toward the shining goal. 
 
 Such is the evolution of religion on its 
 human side. It is only another name for the 
 evolution of manhood, the evolution of the 
 true and loving home, the evolution of the 
 ideal society, the evolution of the just State. 
 
 I asked what caused the evolution of reli- 
 gion on its God-ward side. Let us now ask, 
 What has caused this that is going forward 
 on its side toward man? Has it been an 
 accident? Some lines written by one of 
 the most distinguished of living American 
 scientists shall at least hint an answer: 
 
 “A single thought Divine 
 
 _Holds stars and suns in space. 
 A dream of man is Thine, 
 
 And history finds its place. 
 
72 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 When the universe was young 
 Thine was the perfect thought,— 
 
 That life should be bound in one 
 By a strand of Love enwrought. 
 
 In the life of the fern and the lily, | 
 The dragon and the dove, 
 
 Still through the stress and struggle 
 Waxes the bond of Love. 
 
 Out from the ruthless ages 
 Rises the incense mild, 
 
 Love of the man and the woman, 
 The love of mother and child!” 
 
 Such is the answer of a scientist to whom 
 has come a vision of the larger God and the 
 deeper meaning of the Universe which the 
 thought of Evolution offers. 
 
 Here is a further answer, similar, from a 
 preacher, a poet-preacher, whose eyes also are 
 open to see the profound and far-reaching 
 religious significance of the evolution concep- 
 tion: 
 
 “Shy yearnings of the savage, 
 Unfolding thought by thought, 
 To holy lives are lifted, 
 To visions fair are wrought: 
 The races rise and cluster, 
 The evils fade and fall, 
 Till chaos blooms to beauty, 
 Thy purpose crowning all!’’2 
 
 1David Starr Jordan. 
 2 W. C. Gannett. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 73 
 
 Looking back over all this evolution of the 
 human best in man, shallow thinking may 
 say, Accident! Profounder thought says, 
 There can have been no accident. All has 
 been part of the Eternal Order. Evolution 
 is God’s plan of things. All evolution on 
 this earth, so far as we know, culminates in 
 man. Man culminates in the moral and the 
 spiritual. These must at last become dom- 
 inant in his life, and love must crown all. 
 Then, but not before, will he be a complete 
 man, a man after “the measure of the stature 
 of the fulness of Christ.” 
 
 Nor can the evolution stop with the indi- 
 vidual: it must extend itself throughout 
 society. Social, industrial, and political ev- 
 olution must continue until the moral is 
 everywhere dominant in social relations, in 
 business, and in the State. 
 
 Says Herbert Spencer: 
 
 “Human progress is not an accident, but a neces- 
 sity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a 
 part of nature; all of a piece with the development 
 of the embryo, or the unfolding of a flower. The 
 modifications mankind have undergone, and are 
 still undergoing, result from a law underlying the 
 whole organic creation; and provided the human 
 race continues, and the constitution of things re- 
 mains the same, these modifications must end in 
 completeness. As surely as the tree becomes bulky 
 
74 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 when it stands alone, and slender if one of a group; 
 as surely as the same creature assumes the different 
 forms of cart-horse and race-horse, according as its 
 habits demand strength or speed; as surely as a 
 blacksmith’s arm grows large, and the skin of a 
 laborer’s hand thick; as surely as the eye tends to 
 become long-sighted in the sailor and short-sighted 
 in the student; as surely as the blind attain a 
 more delicate sense of touch; as surely as the clerk 
 acquires rapidity in writing and calculation; as 
 surely as the musician learns to detect an error of a 
 semi-tone amidst what seems to others a very babel 
 of sounds; as surely as a passion grows by indul- 
 gence, and diminishes when restrained; as surely as 
 a disregarded conscience becomes inert, and one 
 obeyéd active; as surely as there is any efficacy in 
 educational culture, or any meaning in such terms 
 as habit, custom, practice; so surely must the 
 human faculties be moulded into complete fitness 
 for the social state; so surely must the things we 
 call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must 
 man become more and more perfect.” 
 
 Such a perfecting of man and such dom- 
 inance of the moral in society will mean 
 nothing less than the establishment on the 
 earth of what Jesus called “the kingdom of 
 God.” 
 
 Of course most of the moral and religious 
 evolution which I have been endeavoring to 
 sketch in this chapter took place before his- 
 toric time. But the process has continued 
 
 1 Social Statics, p. 78 f. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 75 
 
 right on since recorded history began, and is 
 going on still. Nor is there reason to believe 
 that it will cease in any discernible future. 
 
 Perhaps the most remarkable record of re- 
 ligious evolution on a large scale that we 
 have is the Bible. This will be considered 
 more fully in a subsequent chapter, but a 
 word may be said concerning it here. The 
 whole story of the Hebrew people in Palestine 
 is the history of the evolution of a religion. 
 The Bible is both the outcome and the record 
 of that evolution for a thousand years. An 
 important part of the Bible’s value lies in the 
 fact that it 7s a record of religious evolution 
 for so long a time, on so large a scale, and 
 under so exceptionally favorable circum- 
 stances. 
 
 If the religious evolution of the Hebrew 
 people attained at last a splendid height, we 
 must not forget that it began very low. It 
 began in polytheism. Jehovah was thought 
 of as only one of many gods. Other lands 
 and peoples had their gods; Jehovah was the 
 God of the Hebrew people, whom they must 
 worship because he was theirs. The struggle 
 up out of polytheism and the worship of 
 other gods besides Jehovah, to the worship 
 of one God alone, was long and difficult. Even 
 a king like Solomon built altars and shrines 
 
76 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 to other gods. Not until well-nigh five hun- 
 dred years after Solomon’s time was the poly- 
 theism entirely gone. 
 
 Moreover, the character ascribed to Jeho- 
 vah in the earliest times was low, cruel, 
 vindictive, almost wanting in moral elements. 
 We are told of his demanding not only blood- 
 iest animal sacrifices, but human sacrifice. 
 He commands the slaughter of men, women, 
 and helpless, innocent children. The pictures 
 given of him in the Book of Judges show 
 how low and imperfect a conception of the 
 divine character the Hebrew people had when 
 their history, as recorded in the Bible began. 
 But in every age there was advance. No 
 age was without individual men who believed 
 in truth and right and justice; men who had 
 attained to higher ideas of God than their 
 fellows; men who listened to the voice of 
 God speaking in their souls, through reason 
 and conscience. Because these seers, these 
 prophet-souls saw with clearer light than 
 their fellows, and had the courage of their 
 convictions, they were able to lead the nation 
 on and up to higher moral life and worthier 
 views of God and religion, until at last the 
 splendid moral and spiritual heights were 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 77 
 
 attained which we see in the Psalms, in 
 Isaiah, and in the New Testament.? 
 
 But if the history of the religion of ancient 
 Israel was an evolution, not less has the 
 history of Christianity been also an evolution. 
 
 Indeed no careful investigator can doubt 
 that the law of religious evolution is operative 
 in the world to-day on a far wider scale and 
 with far more conspicuous results than ever 
 before. I think I should not overstate if I 
 said that the past century has witnessed 
 more important religious advances in the 
 world than any single century, if not than - 
 any five centuries, of the past. And I be- 
 lieve all the indications are that the next 
 century will witness advances greater still. 
 
 How are we to help on the evolution of reli- 
 gion in the world? By helping on the prog- 
 ress of all knowledge, all truth, all good. 
 Religious evolution cannot go alone. It must 
 go hand in hand with enlightenment. The 
 moral is insecure without the intellectual. In 
 a low civilization religion must be low and 
 crude. As knowledge and thought advance, 
 religion rises to greater purity. In an age 
 
 1For a fuller treatment of the evolution of re- 
 ligious ideas among the ancient Hebrew people, as 
 shown in the Bible, see the author’s book, “The Origin 
 me Character of the Bible,” The Beacon Press, Inc., 
 oston. 
 
78 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 of ignorance, superstition, and credulity, re- 
 ligion can hardly rise above the low plane of 
 magic and priestcraft. In the middle ages 
 the religion of Europe was dark, because the 
 intellect of Europe was dark. The chief work 
 accomplished by Luther was that of letting 
 in light, and freeing the minds of men. When 
 men began to think, the quality of their reli- 
 gion began to improve. If to-day the religion 
 of Protestant Christian lands is the best in 
 the world, it is because the intelligence of 
 these countries is the highest in the world. 
 
 The practical lesson of all this for men who 
 love religion is, Foster education; spread 
 abroad useful knowledge; promote science; 
 maintain schools and colleges; establish 
 libraries; encourage free thought. Be not 
 afraid that these will destroy or injure reli- 
 gion; they will purify it, ennoble it, and save 
 it. 
 
 It is difficult to think of anything more un- 
 reasonable than that intelligent men should 
 fear the doctrine of Evolution. And yet 
 many are afraid lest it injure religion. They 
 could not be more shortsighted. Evolution 
 would not be God’s plan of things if it were 
 not wise and safe. It is God’s method by 
 which in all the past he has been turning 
 seeming evil into good, and good into better. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 79 
 
 Let us have faith; by the same divine method 
 he will yet turn better into best. 
 
 ‘We are sometimes asked, will not man 
 eventually outgrow religion? The best an- 
 swer to this question is Evolution. What 
 has been in man from the beginning will be 
 in him to the end. Especially what is highest 
 in him we may be sure will not be outgrown. 
 He will get purer and better religion; he will 
 not be content with less religion. As man 
 rises in civilization he learns to prize the best 
 things more, not less. He learns to give 
 more attention to knowledge, to books, to 
 nature, to art, to music, to everything that 
 enlarges and enriches his life. Therefore we 
 may be sure that he will not turn his back 
 upon religion, the greatest enlarger, the great- 
 est enricher, the greatest ennobler of life, 
 that humanity has ever found in all its long 
 history. No, the future of religion is secure. 
 And the pledge of that security is God’s great 
 divine law of Evolution. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE PROBLEM OFPAIN AND EVIL 
 IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION 
 
 THE problem of Pain and Evil is a very 
 serious one. It meets everybody. He who 
 has not been troubled by it, who has not at 
 some time wrestled with it, and tried to find 
 a solution for it, has never done much think- 
 ing, and knows little about the earnest side of 
 human life. 
 
 The little child almost before he can walk 
 or talk begins to meet the problem. Why 
 does he fall and bump his head? Why does 
 the fire burn him? Why does his toy horse 
 break when he strikes it with a stick? Why 
 does not his mother always let him have what 
 he wants? These are the forms that the prob- 
 lem of evil takes to the experience of the — 
 child. 
 
 As he gets older it takes other forms: Why 
 must he go to school, or work, when he 
 would rather play? Why is he sometimes 
 sick? Why did his friend and companions 
 move away to some distant place, or die? 
 Why do accidents happen to people? Why do 
 
PAIN AND EVIL 81 
 
 evil thoughts come into his mind—thoughts 
 of anger and hatred and selfishness—when 
 he tries to keep them out? 
 
 And then, as he grows to manhood’s estate, 
 the problem still confronts him in ever chang- 
 ing forms: Why are there poverty and vice 
 and crime in the world? Why tornadoes, and 
 destructive floods and earthquakes and un- 
 timely frosts, and blight and mildew of 
 crops? Why railway and steamship dis- 
 asters? Why wars and tyrannies? Why is 
 the battle of life so severe? And why can no 
 one escape it? Why do disappointments and 
 wrecks of hopes come to men? Why do men 
 grow old? Why does death come to old and 
 young alike? What does death mean? Why 
 are there such things as pain and suffering 
 and death in the world at all? Why is not 
 human life a long day of sunshine and happi- 
 ness, and immunity from pain, and freedom 
 from toil and care, and fruition of all one’s 
 hopes? Could it not just as well have been 
 so? If God were good would he not have 
 made it so? Such thoughts as these come to 
 all earnest minds. What shall we do with 
 them? The only way we can find peace is 
 by facing them, thinking them through, and 
 getting for ourselves a philosophy of life large 
 enough and complete enough to have within 
 
82 EVOLUTION AND KELIGION 
 
 it a place for them all. When once we have 
 attained a view of the universe, of God and 
 of human life, sufficiently comprehensive to 
 gather up into itself all these forms of seem- 
 ing evil, and build them as stones into an 
 edifice of universal good, then, but not before, 
 will their power to hurt us be taken away. 
 
 Can this be done? : 
 
 Thinkers in all ages of the world have at- 
 tempted the task. Some have reached one 
 conclusion, some another. Some have offered 
 systems of philosophy which they believed 
 accomplished the end desired. Others have 
 given up in despair, and declared that the 
 presence of evil in the world means either 
 that God is not almighty, or else that he is 
 not good. Epicurus, the philosopher of 
 Greece, put the matter in this way: ‘Either 
 God is willing to remove evils and not able, or 
 else able and not willing, or neither able nor 
 willing; for if he be both able and willing, 
 whence do they come?” 
 
 John Stuart Mill has drawn a terrible 
 picture of nature marching straight to her 
 ends without regard to what or whom she 
 may crush on the way. Says Mill: 
 
 “Nature impales men, breaks them on the wheel, 
 casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns 
 them to death, crushes them with stones like the 
 
PAIN AND EVIL 83 
 
 first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, 
 freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or 
 slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of 
 other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingen- 
 ious cruelty of a Nero or Domitian never surpassed.” 
 
 This is a terrible arraignment of nature. 
 Is it true? If it is, does it compel the conclu- 
 sion that the God of nature is not good? The 
 conclusion that Mill himself reaches is, that 
 the limitation is on the side of God’s power. 
 He thinks we are not necessarily driven to 
 deny the goodness of the Creator; but we 
 must conclude that he is not omnipotent. In 
 creating and carrying on the physical uni- 
 verse God is compelled to use matter and 
 force. But these have a nature of their own 
 and properties of their own, which limit the 
 divine power. It is to this limitation of his 
 power in respect to nature, therefore, Mr. 
 Mill believes, that we are to attribute the 
 cruelty which we see in nature, and not to any 
 purpose or wish of cruelty, or any lack of 
 goodness, on the part of the Creator him- 
 self. Is this the true view? It is an intricate 
 as well as a serious problem, but I do not 
 by any means think it hopeless. 
 
 First, the great thinkers of the past who 
 have studied the problem of evil, though they 
 may not have wholly solved it, have thrown 
 
84 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 great light upon it, and light which is of value 
 to us. It will be of service if I can offer some 
 of that light. Second, and still more import- 
 ant, since most of these thinkers wrote, a 
 great new thought has come to the world, 
 which I believe is proving a key to this prob- 
 lem to a greater extent than any previous 
 thought has ever done. It is our modern con- 
 ception of Evolution. 
 
 I do not mean that all the darkness which 
 has so long enveloped the questions of pain 
 and sorrow and evil in the world has been driv- 
 en away by the evolutionary philosophy. Much 
 still remains, and probably always will re- 
 main. Man is finite, while God is infinite. 
 The plans and purposes of the Infinite, we, 
 with our limited powers cannot hope to 
 understand, more than in very small part. 
 And yet if Milton might undertake to justify 
 the ways of God to men, as regards the mat- 
 ter of sin and evil in the world, before the 
 light of Evolution shone, it surely is less 
 presumptuous to attempt the same now, 
 helped by the far-reaching illumination of 
 this great conception. 
 
 The solution of the problem of evil which 
 has long been the generally accepted one 
 in Christendom, is that which postulates the 
 doctrine of a fallen and ruined race, based 
 
PAIN AND EVIL 85 
 
 upon the Old Testament story of the tempta- 
 tion and disobedience of Adam and Eve in 
 Paradise. It is claimed that here we have a 
 true account of the origin of sin and suffer- 
 ing in the world. 
 
 Let us examine this claim. Let us see 
 whether the Paradise story really explains - 
 anything. And let us compare the light 
 which it has to throw upon the problem of 
 evil and pain with that which comes from the 
 doctrine of Evolution. To do this it will be 
 necessary for us to pass over a very little 
 ground traversed in a preceding chapter. 
 But this need not trouble us, since we shall 
 do it by a different path and with different 
 ends in view. 
 
 We read in the Book of Genesis that the 
 earth and man were created good. The in- 
 ference is that there was no pain, no suffer- 
 ing, no death, among men or animals, until 
 Adam and Eve, tempted by a talking serpent, 
 which the Christian world has generally re- 
 garded as an embodiment of Satan, ate the 
 forbidden fruit. We are told that as a result 
 of that disobedience God cursed the serpent, 
 condemning it henceforth to go on its belly, 
 and to eat dust. He cursed the ground, that 
 it should bring forth thorns and thistles. He 
 cursed woman, that she should be in subjec- 
 
86 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 tion to her husband, and bring forth children 
 in labor and sorrow. He cursed the man, that 
 he should eat his bread in the sweat of his 
 face, and by and by die. Thus we have death 
 introduced into the world, and every kind of 
 evil. And, if we admit the conclusions drawn 
 by the dominant theology of Christendom, 
 thus we have the whole human race morally 
 ruined, and a very large proportion of ‘it 
 doomed to endless perdition. 
 
 In the light of present-day knowledge, is 
 this a satisfactory explanation of the origin 
 of the evil and suffering that are in the 
 world? 
 
 In our preceding studies we have found 
 that, as a fact, there can have been no literal 
 Adam and Eve. Man came into existence 
 tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of years 
 earlier than the Genesis account contem- 
 plates. He came into existence, not by a 
 sudden act of creation, but by an evolutionary 
 process. The Genesis stories of the creation, 
 the Paradise-garden, the temptation, and the 
 fall, are legends, and not historic narratives. 
 In the nature of the case, therefore, it is 
 folly to seek in them the cause of evil and 
 pain in the world. Indeed, with the disap- 
 pearance of Adam and the fall from the world 
 of reality, all theological doctrines based upon 
 
PAIN AND EVIL 87 
 
 them crumble into ruins and become worth- 
 less. 
 
 But there are other difficulties with the 
 story of the fall besides its unhistoric char- 
 acter. It pictures to us a world such as does 
 not exist, never has existed, and cannot exist 
 in connection with a law-governed or a 
 moral universe. The story represents every- 
 thing as arbitrary. Nothing is under law; 
 there is no attention paid to the nature of 
 things; there is no relation of ‘cause and 
 effect ; there is no moral! order and no justice. 
 If the story had said that as the result of the 
 eating of the forbidden fruit Adam and Eve 
 had suffered bodily illness, or even if it had 
 gone so far as to say that they died, and 
 if the story had stopped with that, we could 
 see some rationality in the assertion, some 
 relation of effect to cause. But when we are 
 told that the first pair were forbidden to eat 
 a certain fruit, and then because they ate 
 it they were driven from their home and 
 were doomed to death; that all their innocent 
 descendants were also doomed to death; and 
 that the earth, which had done nothing 
 wrong, was cursed, we cannot but feel that 
 we are in a realm where the laws of cause 
 and effect do not operate and where there is 
 no moral order and no justice. 
 
88 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 What justice could there be in placing the 
 first human pair in circumstances such that 
 a single mistaken act would ruin their lives 
 irretrievably, not to say ruin all their de- 
 scendants? What were they—these two—but 
 children? They had no experience. God had 
 told them not to eat; if they did they would 
 die. But they did not know what dying was. 
 Another being, who seemed to them as 
 friendly as God, and who for aught they knew 
 might be as wise, came to them in the form 
 of a serpent and told them to eat, saying that 
 they would not die, but would grow wise and 
 become as gods. How could they tell which 
 was speaking the truth? Surely wisdom was 
 desirable. The serpent therefore seemed to 
 offer them the greater good. So they did as 
 the serpent said, and ate. Was there any- 
 thing strange in that? Could it have been an 
 act of very deep guilt? Let two little children 
 to-day under like circumstances commit an 
 act of disobedience, and how heavy punish- 
 ment would any intelligent and just parent 
 inflict upon them? Then on what principle 
 of justice or reason could God decree that, 
 because of a single failure to obey on the part 
 of two children of the early world, not only 
 they but all mankind should fall (to quote 
 the language of the Westminster Catechism) 
 
PAIN AND EVIL 89 
 
 “under his wrath and curse,” and so be made 
 “liable to all the miseries of this life, to death 
 itself, and to the pains of hell forever?” 
 
 Thus we see that nothing is really explained 
 by the Genesis story. Rather is the confusion 
 deepened. We are simply left with moral and 
 physical evil in the world, with seemingly no 
 good reason, and no purpose to be served by 
 either, and no one really responsible but God. 
 The attempt to shift the responsibility upon 
 Adam breaks down utterly; for who made 
 Adam? Who placed him, without any ex- 
 perience or moral strength, in a situation 
 where he would be subjected to a temptation 
 greater than he could resist? The attempt to 
 shift the responsibility upon the tempter 
 breaks down as completely; for who made the 
 tempter? and who permitted him to enter the 
 garden, and to ply his arts upon his defence- 
 less victims? And then, the enormity of hang- 
 ing the fate of the world upon the issue 
 of such a trial!—if they yielded—these 
 inexperienced two—the result, a ruined 
 race! and an endless hell for untold millions! 
 Did the mind of man ever conceive anything 
 more irrational or more shocking? 
 
 So much for the Genesis story of the fall 
 as a solution of the problem of evil. 
 
 And now, let us turn from the old to the 
 
90 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 new; and from Paradise tragedy and the 
 theologies founded thereupon, to the doctrine 
 of Evolution. What light has Evolution to 
 throw upon the problem of sin and evil and 
 pain in the world? 
 
 It is sometimes complained of Evolution 
 that its conception of the origin of evil is not 
 serious enough. In this respect some persons 
 suppose it to contrast unfavorably with the 
 old thought. 
 
 I believe this is an error. What we have 
 already seen, I think, should show us that it is 
 an error. It is the Genesis story and its 
 associated theology that make the origin of 
 evil light and trivial. Think of trying to 
 explain the sin and evil and pain and suffer- 
 ing in the world during all the centuries past 
 and to come, by the child-mistake of an Adam 
 and Eve! As if so slight a matter as the 
 eating of an apple in disobedience to a half- 
 comprehended command could account for the 
 origin of the cruelty, the hate, the revenge, 
 the selfishness, the brutality, the slaveries, the 
 wars, the crimes that have blackened and still 
 blacken the earth! It does not even begin to 
 account for them. We must go infinitely 
 deeper down, and into a region of infinitely 
 more solid realities, before we find an ex- 
 planation that is sufficiently serious, or, as we 
 
PAIN AND EVIL 91 
 
 have already seen, that really explains any- 
 thing. In other words, we must go to Evo- 
 lution. Ask of Evolution whence come the 
 hatreds, the greeds, the revenges, the selfish- 
 nesses, the brutalities, the wars of men, and 
 the answer you get will not be, They are the 
 result of a momentary act of inexperienced 
 children in a Paradise garden; but, They 
 come out of a thousand centuries of lower 
 animal life: They are the traces of the beast 
 surviving in man. They are the heritage of 
 untold ages of selfishness and greed and blood 
 and slaughter in that brute world from which 
 man has sprung, and of hundreds of thousands 
 of years of fierce semi-human life while he 
 was climbing toward the full human; while 
 yet the selfish struggle to preserve his own life 
 was well-nigh all, and before the nobler 
 struggle to preserve the life of others, and 
 therefore the social and moral element in his 
 own life had come in. 
 
 Here you have an explanation both of the 
 origin and the nature of evil that is sufficiently 
 serious. Here you have an explanation that 
 goes back and down to the roots of things, and 
 that explains. No wonder the greed and self- 
 ishness and cruelty and all the brute passions 
 of man are such terrible realties, and fight 
 such battles against the higher forces of his 
 
92 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 nature, and require so hard battling to over- 
 come them, when they came into his life 
 through so long an ancestry! 
 
 What is evil? The reply of Evolution is, 
 Evil is animalism. It is all that old brute 
 world seeking to keep its ascendency, warring 
 against the coming dominion of the soul. It is 
 matter refusing to yield to spirit. It is the 
 lower refusing to move up higher. . 
 
 It is what St. Paul described with such 
 power in Romans, seventh chapter, as the war 
 which he feels going on in himself, between 
 his lower and his higher natures, between the 
 flesh and the spirit, between the animal na- 
 ture, with its appetites and passions, and 
 the spiritual man, with its aspirations and 
 ideals: ‘‘I see a law in my members warring 
 against the law of my mind, and bringing me 
 into captivity to the law of sin which is in my 
 members. . .  .Whoshall deliver me from 
 the body of this death?” 
 
 In the light of Evolution evil is relative, as 
 good is. Evil is incompleteness. Evil is an 
 incident, not a finality. If we can understand 
 the expression in a large enough way, evil is 
 good in the making; it is the green apple; it is 
 the partly painted picture; it is the building 
 in process of erection. Evolution says, The 
 world was not created perfect and complete. 
 
PAIN AND EVIL 93 
 
 It began its career away back in time farther 
 than the mind can think. The creative process 
 has been going on ever since, and is going on 
 still. Thus the world rises in complexity of 
 conditions, and in quality of life. There are, 
 incident to its changes and its progress, a 
 thousand things which, looked at in some 
 aspects, are evils, but yet which have a part 
 in helping on the advance, and hence in 
 achieving the larger results of good. 
 
 Of man Evolution says, He was not created 
 at first in a state of physical, mental, and 
 moral completeness, from which he fell into 
 a condition of ruin. Instead, he began his 
 career far down. From his first low condition 
 he has, somewhat haltingly and irregularly, 
 but on the whole persistently, advanced until 
 he has become what we now see. Evil mani- 
 fests itself in the mistakes which he makes as 
 he gropes his way onward and upward. 
 Especially is evil the tendency in him to choose 
 the lower instead of the higher, to cling to the 
 old heritage which comes to him from the 
 brute, instead of relinquishing that to lay hold 
 of the better things which make for man- 
 hood. 
 
 Thus in Evolution we begin to find a basis 
 for a faith in God that is not shaken by the 
 existence of evil in the world, because it has a 
 
94. EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 philosophy which sees that even evil — tem- 
 porary evil — may serve ends of good beyond 
 itself, and help build a larger structure which 
 is not evil but good. | 
 
 In the light of Evolution no evil, however 
 severe or terrible, necessarily means a God 
 who does not care for men. Even earth- 
 quakes, cyclones, floods, and conflagrations do 
 not necessarily mean either want of goodness 
 or want of power on God’s part. They simply 
 mean that the world is under law. And if law 
 is good, then the fact that the universe is un- 
 der law is a proof that God is good. 
 
 Is law good? Let us suppose a universe 
 under law and another not under law; which 
 would be the better, and the better for man? 
 To ask the question is to answer it. Man 
 simply could not exist in a universe without 
 law; nay, the universe itself could not exist, 
 as a universe; it would instantly become a 
 chaos. Thus if it was kind for God to create | 
 ‘man at all, it was kind to put him under law. 
 
 What is an earthquake? It is simply a 
 world going through its evolutionary process 
 of cooling and contracting under law. What 
 is a tornado or a cyclone? It is simply the 
 wind moving under law amid such conditions 
 as sometimes arise on a planet like ours. 
 What is a conflagration? It is simply fire 
 
PAIN AND EVIL 95 
 
 obeying the laws of its own nature under 
 certain conditions. These calamities may 
 destroy property, or even life, but that does 
 not mean that God is cruel, unless putting the 
 world under law—that is, creating it at 
 all—was cruel. 
 
 Men talk very strangely about God, as if he 
 could both do and not do at the same time. 
 They want him to create fire under law, and 
 yet not let it burn their goods or their houses, 
 when it comes in contact with them. They 
 want water to remain water, and yet not 
 drown them when they fall into it. They are 
 simply asking for contradictions —for what 
 is impossible in the nature of the case. They 
 are asking something as insane as that two 
 and two should be five; or that a part should 
 be greater than the whole; or that a straight 
 line should not be the shortest distance be- 
 tween two points. They are asking that the 
 universe shall not be rational, which is only 
 another way of asking that it shall not exist. 
 
 Of course we may suppose that God could 
 save persons from all accidents and calamities 
 by working special miracles in their behalf. 
 But what kind of a world would we have if a 
 miracle were wrought to save everybody from 
 every kind of danger, calamity, and harm? 
 What would become of our law-governed 
 
96 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 world? And would it be so good for man? 
 If we knew that some guardian power were 
 watching over us, to protect us from every 
 possibility of danger or harm, would it not 
 destroy our foresight, our alertness, our power 
 to care for ourselves, and thus prove a far 
 greater harm than good? What has made us 
 men, but thought, care, foresight, guarding 
 against the breaking of law, planning for our- 
 selves, standing on our own feet? | 
 
 Sicknesses, and especially epidemics, are 
 often pointed to as evidences that God is heart- 
 less; if he is good why does he send these evils 
 upon men? The answer is, Many illnesses 
 are the result of man’s ignorance or care- 
 lessness. Nearly all epidemics are. We 
 should blame men, therefore, and not God. 
 Even where we cannot discover the cause of 
 illness, there probably is a cause somewhere in 
 some violation of a law of health by the suf- 
 ferer or his ancestors. The law is God’s; the 
 violation is man’s. So, then, it is still our duty 
 to blame man rather than God. 
 
 We are apt to complain of pain as if it were 
 an evil. Really it is a good. It is nature’s 
 signal of danger. It puts us on our guard. It 
 tells us that the part where the pain is needs 
 rest or help. And so through the kindly moni- 
 tion of pain our lives are often saved. 
 
PAIN AND EVIL 97 
 
 Men complain of poverty, and hardship, and 
 struggle, and often say in bitterness, Why 
 does God send them upon us? The truth is, 
 men often bring these on themselves. But 
 even when they do not, why should they see 
 in these things a sign of God’s want of love or 
 care? It is poverty, hardship, and struggle 
 that have built up a large part of the strong- 
 est life and noblest character of the world. 
 Men who never have to struggle grow inactive, 
 ease-loving, weak, and find themselves far out- 
 stripped in achievement and in the race of life 
 by those who are spurred to energy by hard- 
 ship. 
 
 Cold and suffering are spoken of as evils. 
 But cold and suffering have created the home: 
 cold, by driving families in-doors, and around 
 a common hearth; and suffering, by calling 
 forth the tenderness, sympathy, and love 
 which give to home its sacred character. 
 
 The long, helpless childhood of the human 
 infant —so much longer and more helpless 
 than that of almost any other creature — 
 seems when looked at superficially to be a 
 great misfortune, and an indication that the 
 Creator’s plan of things is bad. But really 
 the prolongation of infancy is what has made 
 humanity. The utterly dependent condition 
 of her babe for so long a period has awakened 
 
98 _ EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 the maternal instinct and created that finest, 
 highest product of the race, the human mother. 
 The dependence of his children, too, has de- 
 veloped the man into the father; while the 
 extended period of growth of the children, and 
 their long continuance in the home before go- 
 ing out to make a living for themselves, have 
 given them such training, and enabled them 
 to acquire so large a part of the knowledge and 
 experience of their parents, as have given 
 them a tremendous advantage over every other 
 form of animal life, and carried mankind for- 
 ward and upward to an amazing degree. It is 
 hardly possible to estimate the value to the 
 race of this seeming evil—the helplessness, 
 the slow development, and the long need for 
 care and protection, on the part of the human 
 child. } 
 
 Thus we see how many things there are 
 which, looked at superficially, seem evils, but 
 which, examined more carefully, turn out to 
 be priceless blessings. 
 
 Perhaps the severest indictment against na- 
 ture that can be made at all is that which we 
 are prompted to make on account of that re- 
 lentless struggle for existence which has been 
 going on during all the history of life on the 
 planet. Truly nature has been “red in tooth 
 and claw.” | 
 
PAIN AND EVIL 99 
 
 “Then marked he how the lizard fed on ant, and snake 
 on him, 
 And kite on both; and how the fish hawk 
 Robbed the fish tiger of that which he had seized,— 
 The shrike chasing the bulbul, which did chase 
 The jewelled butterfiies, till everywhere 
 Each slew a slayer, and itself was slain.” 
 
 Such a state of things has led many to ask if 
 there can be a God of goodness in the uni- 
 verse. But even here we are not left without 
 some light, if we will look for it. There can be 
 no question that out of this very struggle there 
 has come a vast advance in the world, and 
 therefore a vast good to the world as a whole. 
 It is through this struggle that the fittest have 
 been selected to survive, and thus progress on 
 a world-scale has been secured. Man’s exist- 
 ence is due to this struggle. The only ques- 
 tion is regarding those innumerable lives that 
 have been sacrificed in the struggle, to make 
 the advance possible, and prepare the way for 
 man. Has the price that has had to be paid 
 for the advance, and for man, been justifi- 
 able? The reply is, When we consider what 
 mind and soul mean, it seems hard to think of 
 a price too great to pay for them. 
 
 As to the cruelty of all this sacrifice of life, 
 this is to be said: All these innumerable 
 creatures had life given them and enjoyed it 
 for a season. Was it not better, kinder to 
 
100 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 them, to let them live and die than not to live 
 at all? And die they must have done anyway, 
 even if there had been no struggle for life and 
 no foe. Would death by old age and decay 
 have been kinder than by devouring fellow- 
 creature? It is doubtful. Sudden death is 
 probably the most desirable of all deaths. 
 Persons who have been nearly killed by lions 
 and tigers tell us that the process was almost 
 wholly painless. Thus it is probable that the 
 very process of animal feeding on animal, 
 whereby the weakest have been eliminated and 
 the fittest have been made to survive, has 
 resulted in less suffering than would have 
 taken place if there had been no carnivora in 
 the world. 
 
 This fierce struggle for life went on until 
 man came on the scene. It built his body; but 
 it could not build his soul. For that there 
 must be wholly new agencies, and new agen- 
 cies came. That beautiful struggle for the 
 life of others began, which has endowed the ~ 
 human race with sympathy, care, unselfish- 
 ness, and love, and which will not cease till all 
 the sorrows and pain that afflict humanity are 
 cured. 
 
 Of course it is very easy for men to find 
 fault with the plan of things, if they are 
 shallow men, or, if they are very shallow, it is 
 
PAIN AND EVIL 101 
 
 easy for them to declare that they could de- 
 vise a better. But thoughtful and profound 
 minds stand in wonder and awe at the world 
 as it is—especially as it is revealed in the 
 light of the marvellous evolution through 
 which it has come, and which is still bearing it 
 on to greater things. 
 
 Certain it is that the thought of the devel- 
 opment of the world under law has been the 
 one illuminating conception of our century, 
 shedding light everywhere. Not least illumi- 
 nating has been its light upon the problem 
 of evil. By showing us that the world is not 
 made, but making, and that even man is far 
 from finished, the thought of Evolution lets 
 us see that much which we have called evil is 
 not evil. It is only incompleteness. It is a 
 building in process of erection. It is an en- 
 gine with one part making here, another 
 there, another yonder. By and by the parts 
 will be gathered together into a whole; then 
 we shall see their meaning. Evolution says, 
 Wait; have faith; God has plenty of time; 
 the consummation will appear, largely in this 
 world, fully in another. 
 
 The kind of evil that now most hurts this 
 world is moral evil. What is moral evil? The 
 root of it is selfishness. Once selfishness was 
 not an evil. In the brute fighting his physical 
 
102 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 battle, it was a good. But man has risen to 
 something higher. He must live for wife, 
 child, friend, neighbor, country, the world. 
 That is the very condition of his manhood. To 
 live for self alone is to gravitate back to the 
 old brute condition. 
 
 For man’s moral evolution to get a start 
 was a process inconceivably slow. But every 
 step of its advance made the next step easier. 
 How long it took nature to create a mother! 
 How long a father! How long a friend! 
 How long a lover of humanity! Now we have 
 millions of mothers, of fathers, of friends, of 
 lovers of their fellow-men, to help forward the 
 higher life of mankind. Thus the world moves 
 on with accelerated and fast accelerating 
 speed. This means greater things for the 
 future than we understand. 
 
 Looking around and seeing the many evils 
 in society, we sometimes shudder and are 
 tempted to discouragement. We ought rather 
 to be encouraged because we see the evils. 
 They have always existed in society. At last 
 we are getting our eyes open so that we can 
 recognize them as evils. Many evils have al- 
 ready been destroyed, more must be, will be. 
 The great movement of the world’s evolution 
 on the social and ethical plane will not go 
 backward. No wrong, however hoary, has 
 
PAIN AND EVIL * 103 
 
 any sure lease of life. Only the right and the 
 good can permanently endure. 
 
 No, it is not a fallen world that we are in, 
 but arising one. Eden is not behind, but be- 
 fore. Man’s great day is coming, not past. 
 There has been no wreck of God’s great plan 
 of things, but a steady carrying forward of all 
 the acts of the sublime drama from the begin- 
 ning until now. And what has been is a pledge 
 of what will be. 
 
 Doubtless the philosophy of Evolution 
 needs, to complete it, the thought of Immor- 
 tality, to carry the process begun here in the 
 individual on and up to its full consummation 
 in another life, and also to make good any 
 seeming injustices that may not have been set 
 right in this world—a thought to which 
 Tennyson gives powerful expression in his 
 little poem ‘‘The Play” :— 
 
 “Act First, this Earth, a stage so gloomed with woe 
 You all but sicken at the shifting scenes. 
 And yet, be patient! Our Playwright may show 
 In some Fifth Act what this wild Drama means!” 
 I believe that immortality is the legitimate 
 and necessary goal and crown of Evolution. 
 But this will be the subject of my next chapter, 
 and hence requires only mention here. 
 In conclusion let me say: Standing with 
 eyes open to see every dark and cruel thing 
 
104 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 that is or ever has been in the world; facing 
 all evil, all wrong, all pain, all suffering; lis- 
 tening fully to every complaint and every in- 
 dictment that can be made against nature and 
 her cruelty, and against man and his injustice 
 to his brother — I still believe that we have a 
 right to sing with Browning: 
 
 “This world’s no blot for us, 
 
 No blank; it means intensely, and it means good.” 
 
 “God! Thou art love! I build my faith on that. 
 So doth thy right hand guide us through the world.” 
 I believe that Lowell saw deep below the 
 surface of things, deep into the heart of 
 reality, when he wrote: 
 “All of God’s angels come to us disguised. 
 Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, 
 One after another lift their frowning mask; 
 And we behold the seraph’s face beneath, 
 All radiant with the glory and the calm 
 Of having looked upon the front of God.” 
 Deeply understood, I believe there is noth- 
 ing really to disturb, but everything to sup- 
 port, the faith—the most uplifting ever 
 cherished by man—that we all, and all the 
 world are in the hands of One who has the 
 wisdom and the goodness to plan the best 
 things, and the power to carry them out. 
 We need not be discouraged by any evils 
 that still remain in the world. Rather should 
 
PAIN AND EVIL 105 
 
 we be mightily encouraged by the unmistak- 
 able signs that evils are lessening. All we 
 need be troubled about is lest we fail to ally 
 ourselves with the forces of light that are 
 making the evils fewer. 
 
 Our business in life is to be workers with 
 God. If there is evil, it will some day be 
 driven out. God’s great evolutionary plan of 
 things makes sure of that. But the time when 
 depends upon you and me. Evil is conquered 
 only by good, good wrought out by the hearts 
 and brains and hands of living men and wom- 
 en. If we fail, the consummation waits. 
 
 Every year it becomes a greater shame 
 for any human being to have deaf ears to 
 humanity’s cry for help. Evolution’s ever 
 clearer and clearer sounding message to all 
 good men and women is, Join hands with God, 
 to help him lift his world a little nearer 
 
 _ heaven. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 IMMORTALITY IN THE LIGHT OF 
 EVOLUTION 
 
 Most of us are familiar with that fine passage 
 in Shakespeare’s Tempest: 
 
 “The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
 
 The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
 
 Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, 
 
 And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | 
 
 Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
 
 As dreams are made on; and our little life 
 
 Is rounded with a sleep.” 
 
 This is one view of the world, and of human 
 life. 
 
 Place beside it another. It shall be from 
 Paul’s second Epistle to the Corinthians: 
 “We look not at the things which are seen, 
 but at the things which are not seen; for the 
 things which are seen are temporal, but the 
 things which are not seen are eternal. For 
 we know that if our earthly house of this 
 tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building 
 of God, a house not made with hands, eternal 
 in the heavens.” 
 
 Which of these two views of the world 
 and of life is the true one? What are these 
 
IMMORTALITY 107 
 
 human lives of ours? Are they things of 
 a day only? Or do they take hold on eter- 
 nity? When the funeral bell tolls for our 
 friends (as it will soon toll for us), and 
 we gather around their motionless forms to 
 bid them farewell, will it be forever? Or 
 will there be a glad meeting awaiting us on 
 some fairer shore? 
 
 These are questions that none of us can 
 avoid asking. We should be less than human 
 if we did not ask them. One difference be- 
 tween us and the brute animals below us is 
 that we can ask them, and search for an 
 answer. 
 
 Can Evolution give an answer? Can it 
 help us in the direction of an answer? 
 
 Before making an inquiry concerning the 
 evidences of immortality, it will be of service 
 to do a little preliminary thinking on the gen- 
 eral subject of evidence. There is confusion 
 in many minds as to this whole matter of 
 proof bearing on such subjects as that of life 
 beyond this world. Many men say thought- 
 lessly, “Give us demonstration; give us 
 demonstration; then we will believe; not 
 otherwise.” Do they know what they are 
 saying? What do they mean by demonstra- 
 tion? Mathematical demonstration? Is this 
 subject of a future life one of mathematics? 
 
108 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 Then how are you going to apply mathematical 
 demonstration to it, one way or the other — 
 to prove or to disprove? Is it a subject of 
 logic? Then how are you going to. apply 
 logical demonstration to it, one way or the 
 other ? 
 
 The truth is, very few things in this world 
 can we demonstrate, even of those that we | 
 most firmly believe, and concerning which we ¥ 
 have the best grounds for confidence. We SA! 4°92” 
 cannot demonstrate that the sun will rise to- hw a 
 morrow. We can establish a very strong | 
 probability that it will, but that is all. Yet | 
 that is enough. No reasonable man asks for 4 
 
 | 
 
 
 
 more. On the strength of that probability e | 
 we make all our plans for to-morrow, and go By 
 forward to meet the day with perfect con- A 
 fidence. i 
 
 So with regard to nearly everything in life, 
 our ground for belief is reasonable probability. 
 All business is conducted on grounds of simply 
 reasonable probability. No railroad company ) 
 knows at the beginning of any day that it will - 
 have a single passenger that day. It makes all } | 
 its preparations for the day’s traffic on the > | 
 grounds of probability. No merchant when he : 
 opens his store in the morning knows that he 
 will have a customer. Nobody knows that ie 
 there will be a student in any school of this | 
 
 
 
IMMORTALITY 109 
 
 city next year or to-morrow. And yet reason- 
 able probability is so safe a ground for trust 
 and belief in all these matters that nobody 
 thinks of asking for any other. 
 
 Here is a lesson for us in regard to grounds 
 of belief in immortality. Why are we not 
 content with the same kind of evidence here 
 that we have in other things? We call a man 
 a fool if he will not trust reasonable proba- 
 bility, and trust it with perfect confidence, in 
 business, and in nearly everything pertaining 
 to life. We call him a fool if he insists on 
 demonstration. Then why should we insist 
 on demonstration as soon as we begin to talk 
 about things of another life? Why are we 
 not satisfied there also with reasonable proba- 
 bility? And on the basis of such reasonable 
 probability, if indeed we are able to find it, 
 why do we not rest with assurance and peace? 
 I bring up this point at the beginning, so that 
 none of us may misunderstand regarding the 
 evidence required to give us ground for be- 
 lief in immortality; and so that all may avoid 
 the folly of demanding demonstration in a 
 realm where demonstration is neither pos- 
 sible nor needed. 
 
 Very well, then, in the light of Evolution do 
 there seem to be valid reasons for believing in 
 a future life? And, if so, what are they? 
 
110 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 These questions can be best answered by 
 considering, first, some objections. 
 
 1. Perhaps the objection that is oftenest 
 made to the doctrine of immortality is that of 
 its impossibility, on the ground that mind 
 cannot exist without organism. In this world 
 man lives and thinks; but it is because he has 
 a brain. The brain is the organ of thought. 
 There can be no thought without brain. When 
 a man dies and his brain perishes, there is an 
 end to the man; therefore, immortality is 
 simply impossible. | 
 
 What are we to say to this? It requires 
 only a little reflection to discover an answer. 
 
 In the first place, it seems to be a pure as- 
 sumption that mind can exist only in connec- 
 tion with an organism. That the human mind 
 is associated with a physical organism in the 
 present life does not prove that no other plan 
 of things is possible. For aught we know 
 there may be such a thing as free spirit — 
 spirit existing untrammelled by any organism — 
 of a physical kind—spirit as free as our 
 thoughts are, and as superior to all brain limi- 
 tations, matter limitations, space limitations 
 —like our thoughts now here, now at the 
 other side of the earth, now in the distant 
 stars. Why may not spirit exist as free as 
 that? We certainly see evidences of mind in 
 
IMMORTALITY 1 
 
 nature everywhere, in the rose, in the gal- 
 axies, in the sweep of law, in all the order of 
 the universe. Has this mind a brain? Is it 
 associated with organisms, or dependent on 
 organism? Who dare say that? Then we 
 had better be careful how we assert that there 
 can be no mind without organism; and cer- 
 tainly we had better consider before we de- 
 clare that there can be no mind without brain. 
 
 Even if we grant that mind does require an 
 organism, what kind? Is no kind possible for 
 something so fine as spirit, except such coarse 
 brains as ours? Grant that in such a physical 
 world as this—a world of earth, and rock, 
 and air, and water, a world seen by the eye, 
 and heard by the ear, and come into contact 
 with by physical touch — such brains as ours 
 may be necessary; but how about those finer, 
 those subtler, those more wonderful worlds 
 which science is revealing to us in so many 
 ways ?—worlds which are all about us, which 
 transcend and penetrate this gross world of 
 sense — worlds which stretch away into in- 
 finity, an “‘ Unseen Universe, ” and yet, though 
 unseen, if possible more real, and infinitely 
 more resourceful and more marvellous than 
 the universe which our eyes behold! Into such 
 a universe, limitless in possibilities, whether 
 considered extensively or intensively, the spec- 
 
112 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 troscope and our theories of light-waves and 
 of a universal ether give us a glimpse; into 
 it electricity sets a door ajar; into it the 
 Roentgen rays open a little window; into it 
 the microscope with its marvels carries us a 
 little way—an inch or two; of its wonders 
 Professor Crooke’s “‘radiant energy” gives a 
 hint. Are we to suppose that in such a uni- 
 verse of infinite subtlety, and yet of solidest 
 reality and inconceivable potentialities, mind 
 must require an organism of the coarse kind 
 which we see in our present brains and nerv- 
 ous systems? 
 
 Even if minds — at least finite minds like 
 ours — do require an organism, is it not easy 
 to conceive of an organism framed of the 
 subtler material of the Unseen Universe — 
 such material as radiant energy and the uni- 
 versal ether and electricity and the X-rays 
 give us intimation of? Some of our greatest — 
 
 physicists are telling us that there is “no fact 
 
 in physics, chemistry, or mechanics that con- 
 travenes the theory of an electro-luminous 
 organism for man,” such as may exist already 
 unseen and unrecognized within his physical 
 body, and wholly incapable of being affected 
 by any such change as that of the dissolution 
 of his body. 
 
 Something like this seems to have been Saint 
 
IMMORTALITY 113 
 
 Paul’s thought, nineteen hundred years ago, 
 when he said “there is a natural body and a 
 spiritual body’”—a body of flesh and blood, 
 which is corruptible and perishes at death, 
 and another of a nature finer and higher, 
 which is incorruptible, and cannot be affected 
 by death. The widely accepted, and I believe 
 the fast-growing belief to-day among thought- 
 ful men is virtually this. Toward essentially 
 such a view I believe all our best science is 
 tending. 
 
 2. One profoundly significant fact we are 
 very likely to overlook in all our discussions of 
 the possibility of man’s living again after 
 death; it is the fact that every man who is 
 living at all is already living after death — 
 and not only after one death, but after sev- 
 eral. 
 
 What do I mean? I mean that life and 
 death are both at work all the while in our 
 bodies. Without death there is no life. By 
 the process which is known in physiological 
 science as anabolism and katabolism our 
 bodies are all the while dying and being built 
 up again with new tissue. In some of the 
 organs of the body the breaking down of the 
 old tissue and the replacing of that which has 
 done its work with new is rapid; in other or- 
 gans it is comparatively slow. There seems to 
 
114 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 be no general consensus of opinion among 
 scientists as to just how long a time it takes 
 for the dying process to involve all the or- 
 ganic matter of the body. It has sometimes 
 been said that we get a wholly new physical 
 organism once in seven years. This is a dog- 
 matic statement which probably science does 
 not justify. The time may be too short or it 
 may be too long. But nothing is more certain 
 than that the process of destruction and re- 
 building is constantly going on, more or less 
 rapidly, in every part of the body; and hence 
 that, within a period longer or shorter, every 
 particle of living matter in any given human 
 organism at any particular time will have 
 died, and most of it will have passed away 
 from the organism, and its place will have 
 been taken by other matter. This is only 
 another way of saying that we are all con- 
 stantly losing our bodies by death and getting 
 new ones. In a few years — possibly three or 
 four, possibly seven, possibly ten —all the 
 living material in the bodies which we now 
 have will be dead, and we, if we remain in the 
 flesh at all, will be “‘ clothed upon ” with what 
 in strictest scientific truth may be called new 
 bodies. Thus I trust my meaning is clear 
 when I say that we are all living after death, 
 and most of us after many deaths. Our bodies 
 
IMMORTALITY 115 
 
 died, we did not. Right through all these 
 deaths each one of us (his soul, his conscious- 
 ness, his ego, his real self, that thinks and 
 wills and loves) has persisted, has lived right 
 on. 
 
 Does all this have no significance as bear- 
 ing upon the subject of immortality? Men 
 say, our souls cannot survive the death of 
 our bodies. I reply: How do you know? 
 What ground have you for such an inference? 
 If we have already survived the death of our 
 bodies many times, or even once, how dares 
 any one deny that we may be able to do it 
 again? Even if the next death comes in a 
 somewhat different way from those of the 
 past, it will be no more certainly death. 
 
 8. Another objection to the doctrine of im- 
 mortality, which is often made, is the claim 
 that no line can be drawn between man and 
 the animals below him, so that if man is im- 
 mortal they also must be. They and he came 
 into being by the same path of Evolution — 
 many of them have bodies close akin to his; 
 many give evidence of intelligence, reason, and 
 other mental attributes similar to his; some 
 even show moral qualities, as fidelity, a sense 
 of duty, an ability to distinguish between right 
 and wrong. Must we not believe, therefore, 
 that they and he will have the same fate? If 
 
116 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 he lives again, will not they? If they perish, 
 must not he? 
 
 In reply, the first thought that suggests it- 
 self is the inquiry: Why may it not be possible 
 that at least all the nobler and more intelligent 
 of the lower animals may live again? Some, 
 by reason of their better qualities and their 
 higher intelligence, would seem to be fitter to 
 survive than others. Perhaps that is the ul- 
 timate outcome of the great law of the sur- 
 vival of the fittest, that some of the animals 
 below man may be permitted to cross into an- 
 other world and be man’s companions there as 
 they have been here. It would seem easier to 
 believe this than to believe that man is to 
 perish. | 
 
 However, I cannot think the claim is sound 
 that man and the brute animals are to be 
 classed together. We do not class them to- 
 gether in other respects; why should we in 
 this? There seem to be certain very radical 
 distinctions between them. What are they? 
 As pointed out in a previous chapter, the most 
 important appears to be self-consciousness. 
 When in the upward progress of animal life 
 in this world a being arrived who was not only 
 conscious, but was conscious that he was con- 
 scious; who not only knew, but knew that he 
 knew; who was a self-centred ego, able to 
 
IMMORTALITY 117 
 
 think before and after, and to relate himself 
 not only to his physical environment, but to 
 truth and right and duty and the powers that 
 placed him here, and to reach up after ideals 
 of life higher than he had yet attained, then 
 man was born. Then acreature had made his 
 appearance on the earth not simply superior 
 in degree to the horse and the dog and the ape, 
 but different in kind. At last the century 
 plant of the world’s life had blossomed, and 
 the blossom was something more beautiful and 
 precious than had ever before been seen be- 
 neath earthly skies. 
 
 Suppose we grant that the dog has some- 
 thing which we may call a sort of rudimen- 
 tary, partially formed mind; is there anything 
 strange if nature permits a thing so imper- 
 fect to pass out of existence at the death of 
 the body which it has served? It is every- 
 where nature’s plan, to let the imperfect, the 
 only partially formed, drop out, and preserve 
 permanently only the best, the most perfect. 
 
 This also is man’s plan. Go with me into a 
 great foundry where castings are being made. 
 I see a hundred moulds filled with the shining 
 metal. Wait until the moulds are opened. 
 Ninety of the castings are perfect, ten are 
 imperfect. What is done with the imperfect? 
 They are broken, and melted over again. Is 
 
118 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 there anything unreasonable in that? Dogs, 
 horses, apes, the animals below man, are the 
 imperfect castings of the world of mind. Why 
 should they be permanently kept? Man is the 
 most perfect mind-product of the world. Is 
 that not reason why he may be preserved, 
 even when they are suffered to perish? | 
 
 Nature is full of illustrations of that which, 
 falling below a certain mark, fails, while that 
 which rises above persists. Thus a seed, if it 
 has within it a certain amount of vitality, 
 lives, germinates, and produces after its kind, 
 while if it lacks, no matter how little, of the 
 requisite amount, it dies. 
 
 Says John Fiske: 
 
 “IT can see no insuperable difficulty in the notion 
 that, at some period of the evolution of humanity, 
 this the divine spark may have acquired sufficient 
 concentration and steadiness to survive the wreck of 
 material forms and endure forever.” 
 
 For one I cannot see why this view is not in 
 the highest degree reasonable. 
 
 4. One other objection to the doctrine of 
 immortality I must mention in a word. It is 
 the claim that in Evolution it is the race that 
 is cared for, not the individual; so that if im- 
 mortality of any kind awaits man we must be- 
 lieve it is immortality of the race in this world, 
 
IMMORTALITY 119 
 
 and not immortality of individual persons 
 beyond this world. 
 
 But how can nature care for the race with- 
 out caring for individuals? Can the race be 
 separated from the individuals who compose 
 it? As for immortality of the race in this 
 world, we know that cannot be; for it is only 
 a question of time when the earth itself shall 
 reach the end of its career, and when its shal- 
 lowing seas, its frozen continents, and thin air 
 will no longer sustain the life of man. 
 
 But it is not true that nature does not care 
 for individuals. Individuals are exactly what 
 she does care for. Her whole effort is to pro- 
 duce individuals that shall be finer and finer, 
 more and more perfect. It is by improving 
 her individuals that she makes all her ad- 
 vances in species, genera, families, races. 
 With such jealous and unfailing care for in- 
 dividuals, and such constant effort to produce 
 the best, is it any wonder if the individuals of 
 that part of creation which represent her best 
 should be perpetuated, and not allowed to 
 perish? Shall nature not care enough for her 
 chef-d’ oeuvre to save it from ruin? If there 
 is to be any immortality at all, it must be of 
 the individual, and in a sphere beyond the 
 transitoriness of earthly conditions; it cannot 
 be of the race here. Either there is immor- 
 
120 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 tality for individual man, or else there is utter 
 and irremediable destruction for man, race, 
 everything that this world has achieved or 
 meant. 
 
 Such, then, are the most serious objections, 
 so far as I know, to the doctrine of man’s im- 
 mortality considered in the light of Evolution. 
 Looked at fairly do they not fade away? I 
 believe the considerations presented show that 
 they do, and that immortality, instead of be- 
 ing impossible, is possible, and has much 
 probability in its favor. 
 
 But we are not yet through. Other adie even 
 stronger arguments for immortality still re- 
 main. 
 
 1. First of all, it seems to be a well-nigh 
 universal belief of men—a belief so deep as to 
 be a very part of their nature —that death 
 does not end all, but that there is another 
 existence beyond the present scene. It is 
 doubtful if a single people in the world can 
 be pointed to, savage or civilized, that does 
 not cherish this belief in some form. Even 
 the Buddhists are no exception, as might easily 
 be shown. 
 
 Now what does this mean? This belief has 
 not been wrought into the nations and races of 
 mankind by chance. The universe has planted 
 this faith in man’s soul. May we, then, believe 
 
IMMORTALITY 121 
 
 it a lie? Is there no reality corresponding to 
 it? 
 
 Why has the universe wrought for man 
 eyes? Because there was something to see. 
 Why ears? Because there was something to 
 hear. Why reason? Because he was in a 
 universe that was rational. Why a sense of 
 beauty? Because there was beauty all around 
 him waiting to be recognized. Why love? Be- 
 cause there were beings to be loved, and to 
 love him in return. Why his belief in right 
 and justice? Because there are right and jus- 
 tice in the world. Is man’s belief in immor- 
 tality an exception? While all else in his be- 
 ing is grounded in reality, is this ineradicable 
 faith of his, that he was not born to die, only a 
 delusion? 
 
 Do you say it is simply a superstition, like 
 witchcraft, or faith in signs? Then why does 
 it not show some marks of superstition? Why 
 is it not confined to dark ages and uncivilized 
 peoples? Why does it not tend to pass away 
 with enlightenment? Instead of that, it is 
 found nowhere in such strength as in enlight- 
 ened ages, and among enlightened peoples. 
 Nor is it the worst, but the best persons, that 
 hold it most firmly. The greatest believers in 
 immortality, as a rule, are the greatest and 
 noblest souls of every age. 
 
122 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 I think all this means that the belief is ra- 
 tional, and rooted in great realities which men 
 may trust. I think man’s instinct that he is 
 greater than the brute beasts, greater than a 
 clod, greater than death, is a voice of the uni- 
 verse—and this means a voice of God—speak- 
 ing in his soul. 
 
 2. Somewhat similar to this, yet different, 
 is another argument, which I think ought to 
 be regarded as having weight. It is the argu- 
 ment of justice, based on the fact that man 
 everywhere wants immortality, longs for it as 
 for nothing else. There are here and there 
 exceptions—men who say one life is enough. 
 But they are so rare as to be scarcely visible 
 amid the multitudes of those who long and 
 pray for a life that has no death. Now what 
 has put this desire into men’s hearts? Did 
 they create it for themselves? It came to 
 them from the Creator of their being. Did 
 he give it to them in mockery? Can he of 
 right withhold immortality from men into 
 whose hearts he has himself put such desire 
 for it? 
 
 3. Have we not a right to base a faith in 
 immortality on the greatness of man’s nature? 
 Think of minds that can work out the intrica- 
 cies of mathematics in all its endless forms; 
 that can create sciences; that can write lit- 
 
IMMORTALITY 123 
 
 eratures; that can bridge the ocean with swift 
 steamships, and speak from shore to shore 
 beneath its waters; and harness the lightnings, 
 and measure and weigh the worlds of space; 
 and rob surgery of pain, and say to pestilence, 
 Stay thy hand of death; and transform deserts 
 into paradises, and build great cities, and rule 
 vast empires, and connect all sections together 
 by trade, and link every city and town of 
 every civilized land with every other by mail 
 routes; and lift the world up century by cen- 
 tury to higher and higher civilization! Can 
 minds that accomplish all this be snuffed out 
 as a candle at the end of a brief threescore 
 years and ten? 
 
 Is man built on a pattern suited only for 
 a day? Look at these powers of his that are 
 unearthing, restoring, reconstructing the past 
 —actually creating the world’s past over 
 again! We are digging up Rome, and open- 
 ing its buried centuries and its forgotten his- 
 tories to the light of day. We are excavating 
 at many places in Greece and Crete and Asia 
 Minor, and finding cities hidden beneath cities, 
 and learning more about their history, their 
 art, their civilization, and their life, than even 
 Plato or Aristotle knew. The same with 
 Egypt! A little while ago the great Egypt of 
 the past was lost to the world. Men looked 
 
124 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 on her wonderful monuments with blind eyes 
 that could not see. Not a word of the inscrip- 
 tions that covered her temples and tombs could 
 they read. The history and civilization of 
 her almost numberless centuries were as if | 
 they had not been. The same was true of 
 Babylonia and Assyria. But within our cen- 
 tury man has unlocked the mysteries of these 
 lands and is bringing them all to light. So too 
 he is creating anew the mound-builders and 
 their lives, and the cave-dwellers and theirs, 
 and is finding out the secrets of the ages be- 
 fore man existed, when only brute beasts 
 inhabited the earth, and of ages yet more re- 
 mote when there was no life of any kind. In- 
 deed it seems as if there is no secret of the 
 past that he will not discover. Is such a being 
 only a creature of a day? 
 
 4. Are there not prophecies wrapped up in 
 in man which declare that he was not born to 
 die? 
 
 Man’s nature seems to be full of prophecies 
 of something greater than he has yet attained, 
 or can attain in this world. Such a prophecy 
 is seen in his capacity of growth and progress. 
 The brute animals may advance a little way. 
 Then the end of their tether is reached, they 
 can go no farther. 
 
 But man’s capacities for development are 
 
IMMORTALITY 125 
 
 practically infinite. None may lay down a line 
 beyond which he may not go. None can draw 
 a circle bounding his knowledge or his 
 thought. Only the universe is large enough 
 for his home; only eternity long enough for 
 the realization of the possibilities that sleep 
 in his great nature. 
 
 I know not how anything can be more clear 
 than that human life as we see it in this world 
 is a thing unfinished, incomplete. Does this 
 incompleteness mean nothing? Everywhere 
 we see “great powers and small performances; 
 vast schemes and petty results, ‘thoughts that 
 wander through eternity,’ and a life that 
 
 ‘Can but little more supply 
 Than just to look about us and to die.’ 
 
 “Who has ever lived to accomplish his ut- 
 most aim? What career is so complete as to 
 . comprehend all that is wanted of this world? 
 We all retire with imperfect victory from the 
 battle of life. The campaign is not finished 
 when we strike tents. . . . The scholar 
 has still unsolved problems at which he is 
 laboring. The philosopher is summoned in the 
 midst of experiments he cannot stay to com- 
 plete. The philanthropist is overtaken in pro- 
 jects of reform that are to add new value to 
 human life.” | 
 
126 EVOLUTION AND EELIGION 
 
 Martineau, at eighty, though his life had 
 been marvellously full of attainment, ex- 
 claimed, ““How small a part of my plans have I 
 been able to carry out! Nothing is so plain as 
 that life at its fullest on earth is a fragment.” 
 
 Sir Isaac Newton, at the end of a life that 
 achieved more for science than almost any 
 other of modern times, compared himself to a 
 child who had merely gathered a few pebbles 
 on the beach, while the vast ocean lay beyond 
 unexplored. 
 
 Victor Hugo, in his old age, declared: “For 
 half a century I have been writing my thoughts 
 in prose and verse: history, philosophy, 
 drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, and 
 song. I have tried all. But I feel I have not 
 said a thousandth part of what is in me.” 
 
 Now what is the explanation of this strange, 
 dark riddle of the incompleteness of human 
 life—the fragmentariness of even the fullest 
 earthly career? If man is at the beginning of 
 his existence, all is plain. If he is at the end, 
 all is midnight darkness. I know of no phi- 
 losophy that gives us a ray of light except that 
 of Hugo, who completed the passage from 
 which I have quoted by adding: “When I go 
 down to the grave I can say, like so many 
 others, ‘I have finished my day’s work,’ but I 
 cannot say, ‘I have finished my life.’ I shall 
 
IMMORTALITY 127 
 
 begin again next morning. The tomb is not 
 a blind alley; it is a thoroughfare. I close on 
 the twilight to open with the dawn.” 
 
 With this philosophy of life, all is luminous. 
 Fragments that are parts of larger wholes, 
 we can understand. Beginnings that are meant 
 to go on until some worthy end is reached, 
 we can understand. We can understand in- 
 completeness that is on its way to complete- 
 ness. But fragments that have no meaning, 
 incompleteness that ends with itself, begin- 
 nings that were never intended to be any- 
 thing else but beginnings, throw us into utter 
 intellectual confusion. We are dazed and 
 dumb. We have the sense that all intelligence 
 has gone out of the universe, and that the 
 rational foundation of things has given way. 
 
 5. This leads to a final reason which com- 
 pels me to believe in immortality for man. It 
 is that I may keep my faith in the rationality 
 of nature, or, to express it better, in the rea- 
 sonableness of God’s work. 
 
 Wherever I look in the heavens or in the 
 earth, there are signs of a divine wisdom. In- 
 deed with such wisdom the whole universe is 
 ablaze, from mightiest sun down to tiniest 
 molecule. Order is everywhere; adaptation is 
 everywhere; harmony is everywhere; law is 
 everywhere. All this means that reason is 
 at the heart of things. 
 
128 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 But if this be so, then must man be immor- 
 tal. For it is impossible to believe that ra- 
 tionality holds everywhere else. and breaks 
 down when it comes to man. Everything be- 
 low man has its raison d’étre; does man have 
 none? Everything else has its clear aim and 
 purpose; was man, the highest of all, made 
 only to be destroyed as soon as completed? 
 Everywhere below man there is progress. The 
 inorganic prepares the way for the organic. 
 The organic rises to the psychic. The psychic 
 culminates in man, a being who can reason, 
 and thus put himself into relations with the In- 
 finite Reason; who can ‘‘think God’s thoughts 
 after him’; who can know, and admire, and 
 consciously put himself into harmony with 
 God’s laws; who can understand justice, right- 
 eousness, and truth; who can aspire and wor- 
 ship, and meet God’s love with an answering 
 love, as a child responds to the affection of a 
 parent. Can we believe that God, having 
 through an evolutionary process of millions of 
 years, and at an expense so vast that we can 
 only call it infinite, brought into existence a 
 being so high, so near in nature to himself, 
 has nothing for that being but death and ex- 
 tinction as soon as made? Then the rational- 
 ity of the universe breaks down. God is less 
 intelligent than even a man; for no man would 
 
IMMORTALITY 129 
 
 do anything so utterly without reason as that. 
 
 If a man should plant fruit trees and cut 
 them down as soon as they began to bear fruit, 
 or paint pictures and destroy them as soon as 
 finished, or build ships never intending to 
 send them to sea, we should say he had lost 
 his reason, and call him a fool and not a man. 
 But even such folly would seem to be as noth- 
 ing compared with that which could bring man 
 into existence as the crown and culmination 
 of nature’s infinitely vast and infinitely ex- 
 pensive evolutionary process, only to blot him 
 out as soon as made. 
 
 No, I am compelled to believe that man will 
 not be destroyed—that God has made him to 
 partake of his own divine nature and be as 
 immortal as himself, because I believe in the 
 reasonableness of God’s work. Faith in God 
 seems necessarily to carry with it 
 
 “faith 
 
 That, some far day, will be found 
 Ripeness in things now rathe, 
 
 Wrong righted, each chain unbound, 
 Renewal born out of scathe. 
 
 *T have faith such end shall be. 
 From the first Power was—I knew; 
 Life has made clear to me 
 That, strive but for closer view, 
 Love were as plain to see. 
 
130 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 “When see? When there dawns a day, 
 If not on the homely earth, 
 Then yonder, worlds away, 
 Where the strange and new have birth 
 And Power comes full in play.” 
 
 It is said that God suffers other things to 
 perish —then why not man? The reply is, 
 What does he permit to perish whose cost 
 bears any comparison with that of man?—or 
 whose intrinsic greatness is to be even men- 
 tioned beside man’s? 
 
 In a world where Evolution is the law, it 
 seems inevitable that man’s body must die. 
 But what need for his soul to die? The de- 
 struction of his body is a slight matter. But 
 the death of his soul would be an infinite loss — 
 —not only involving the destruction of man, 
 but seeming to take all meaning out of the 
 evolutionary process, and thus virtually to 
 destroy God — for what God have we left if 
 we can see no meaning in his universe? 
 
 For one, I cannot believe the universe 
 idiotic. That God’s evolutionary process by 
 which he has created both the world and man 
 means something great and worthy, I do not 
 even know how to question. Much more easily 
 could I question my own sanity. But if it does 
 mean something great and worthy, then man 
 is safe, and safe forever. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE BIBLE, JESUS, AND CHRIS- 
 LEAN De CON TD Hee uTG HT) OF 
 EVOLUTION 
 
 IN the light of Evolution, how are we to 
 look upon the Bible? 
 
 I answer: The most obvious fact to be 
 noted is that the Bible is one of the world’s' 
 great sacred books. 
 
 Sacred books are not peculiar to Christian- 
 ity and Judaism. The Hindus have theirs; 
 the Buddhists have theirs; the Chinese have 
 theirs; the Mohammedans have theirs. Most 
 Christian scholars rank ours as higher in 
 moral and spiritual value than any of the 
 others. I have given some study to all, and it 
 seems to me that ours is justly to be placed 
 first. But whether this be true or not, it is 
 plain that all belong to one class; all are 
 members of one family. 
 
 Sacred books mark a stage in the religious 
 progress of mankind. They are at once re- 
 sults of that progress, and factors in it. 
 
 Some sacred books spring from a man, 7 
 great prophet or religious teacher. They are 
 the record of his teachings and his life. Thus 
 
132 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 the Koran of the Mohammedans is the record 
 of the life and teachings of Mahomet. The 
 Tripataka (or Three Baskets) of the Bud- 
 dhists, gives us the teachings of Buddha. Our 
 Gospels give us the life and teachings of Jesus. 
 
 Other sacred books spring from the people, 
 rather than from any single person; they are 
 the product of the people’s religious life for 
 a considerable period of time. Such are the 
 Vedas of India. These Vedas are composed 
 of hymns and prayers and religious liturgies, 
 and were hundreds of years in coming into 
 existence. Such, too, is our Old Testament, 
 which was also hundreds of years in coming 
 into being. Our Bible as a whole, including 
 the Old Testament and the New, spans more 
 than a thousand years of time, between the 
 origin of its earliest book and the origin of 
 its latest. | 
 
 We call the Bible a book; it is much more 
 accurate to think of it as a literature — the. 
 literature of the Hebrew people for a period 
 essentially as long as from King Alfred the 
 Great to the present day. 
 
 This literature is wholly natural — as nat- 
 ural as a literature could possibly be. It 
 sprang out of all that was real and earnest 
 in the history and experience of the people — 
 their public life, their private life, their secular 
 
THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 133 
 
 life, their religious life; peace, war; pros- 
 perity, adversity; birth, marriage, death; joy, 
 sorrow; youth, age; the home, the synagogue, 
 the temple; the life of the shepherd, caring 
 for his sheep almost as if they were children, 
 leading them by the side of still waters and 
 in green pastures, and protecting them from 
 the foes that waited to attack and devour; the 
 life of the agriculturist, sowing and reaping 
 his grain, or caring for his vineyard; the life 
 of the city, with its buying and selling; the 
 life of the king, with its public duties and 
 cares, and with its outward splendors. Prose, 
 poetry, history, biography; elaborate ecclesi- 
 astical regulations, law codes, genealogies; 
 legends, myths, tales of sweet peace, tales of 
 horrible blood and battle and barbarity; 
 thrilling phophecies of hope, pessimistic wails 
 of despair; earnest prayers, tender hymns of 
 devotion, solemn hymns of contrition, soul- 
 stirring hymns of joy and praise; wise prov- 
 erbs, beautiful parables, crude superstitions of 
 an unscientific age; idyls of love, romances, 
 odes, elegies, epistles, wild apocalyptic dreams, 
 mighty moral appeals, tremendous denuncia- 
 tions of wrong—almost all forms of utterance 
 by which life can be portrayed or the human 
 soul can give expression to its hopes and fears, 
 its fruitions and disappointments, its contri- 
 
134 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 tions, aspirations, and highest worships, its 
 struggles, its defeats, and its victories — all 
 these, slowly, and by wholly natural causes, 
 gathered together into a single volume, con- 
 tribute to make up this marvellous, this many- 
 sided, this in many ways imperfect, yet this 
 great and incomparably precious book wae 
 we call our Bible. 
 
 But when I say that no book ever came into 
 existence more naturally, that does not mean 
 that God was not init. It means that God was 
 in it; for the natural is God’s way of doing 
 things—that is what makes it natural. No 
 book was ever more deeply or truly a human 
 book. But because it was a human book, 
 therefore it was a divine book. For where 
 is God’s fullest revelation of himself except 
 in the human? God speaks through the stars 
 of the night, the flowers of the field, and 
 all the marvellous on-goings of physical na- 
 ture. But his clearest speech is ever in man’s 
 soul. Because the Bible is rich with deep 
 revelations of the human, it is rich with deep 
 revelations of God; for ever through that 
 which is deepest and truest in human souls— 
 
 1 See the author’s book, “The Origin and Char- 
 acter of the Bible,” chapters i., ii., iv., xv., xvi, 
 xxiii. The Beacon Press, Inc. 
 
THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 135 
 
 our own or other men’s—we approach nearest 
 to God. 
 
 In the history of the human race, different 
 nations and peoples have different parts to 
 perform. The genius of Greece was intellect- 
 ual and esthetic. The genius of Rome was 
 legal, organizing, practical. The genius of 
 Palestine was ethical and spiritual. Greece, 
 through her art and poetry and philosophy, 
 had a work to do, not only for herself, but for 
 all peoples. Rome, through her law, had a 
 work to do, not only for herself, but for man- 
 kind. Palestine, through her religion, had a 
 still more important work to do for the world. 
 We speak of the Jews as a chosen people. And 
 truly they were. But what people that is true 
 to itself, true to its own genius and mission, 
 is not a chosen people? What people does not 
 have a place to fill in the progress of the race, 
 even if its place be not so important as that 
 of the Greeks or the Jews? Thus we see how 
 large are God’s ways; and by how many agen- 
 cies he carries on the divine education of hu- 
 manity. 
 
 It is important for us to understand, not 
 only that the Bible grew, grew as naturally as 
 any other literature—part by part, this book 
 or fragment of a book in this age, and that in 
 the next, and so on, as long as the Jewish 
 
136 EVOLUTION AND LEELIGION 
 
 people continued to live in Palestine—but it is 
 also important for us to understand that this 
 literary growth was accompanied by, and reg- 
 isters, a distinct moral growth, a distinct relig- 
 ious advance of the people from first to last. 
 
 The religion of Israel was not equally per- 
 fect in its earlier and later periods. It did 
 not start as high as it ended. On the con- 
 trary it started very low, and only rose to its 
 later elevation very slowly, and through varied 
 experiences and long struggles. When the 
 children of Israel first came into Palestine 
 from Egypt, under the leadership of Moses, 
 they were newly liberated slaves. Their civi- 
 lization was very crude, their moral develop- 
 ment was rudimentary, their conceptions of 
 religion and of God were very imperfect. 
 They had been idolaters, and were only just 
 beginning to lay the idolatry aside; and for 
 hundreds of years they kept lapsing back into 
 idolatry, again and again, whenever they could 
 find any pretext. Their ideas of the divine 
 character were hardly above those held by the 
 heathen peoples around about them. They 
 thought of Jehovah as getting angry, as 
 jealous, as repenting, as deceiving, as sanc- 
 tioning fraud, as commanding shocking cruel- 
 ties, such as the slaughter of thousands of 
 men, women, and innocent children, as mani- 
 
THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC. 137 
 
 festing every passion and imperfection otf 
 man. Not only were there vast numbers of 
 bloody animal sacrifices offered to him, but 
 even human sacrifices, as in the cases of 
 Jephtha’s daughter, and Abraham’s offering 
 of Isaac, commanded, but at the last moment 
 averted; and Samuel hewing King Agag in 
 pieces “before the Lord.” 
 
 And the morals of the people were not high- 
 er than their ideas of God. Read such books 
 as Joshua and Judges, and see the lawlessness 
 and cruelty that abound; assassinations like 
 those committed by Ehud and Jael; brutalities 
 like those practiced upon Adonibezek and the 
 seventy kings; debaucheries like those of Sam- 
 son; Samuel’s words to Saul, “Smite Amalek; 
 destroy all; slay man and woman, infant and 
 suckling.”’ 
 
 I say, such was the low condition of civiliza- 
 ' tion, morals, and religion among the Israelites, 
 when, soon after emerging from the bondage 
 of Egypt, they began their national career in 
 Palestine. It was from this that they rose to 
 what they afterward became. This was the 
 starting-point of that remarkable evolution, 
 which as the centuries went on, lifted them to 
 such a height, and gave them the psalms, the 
 prophets, and finally Jesus and Paul, and the 
 lofty teachings of the New Testament. 
 
138 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 What is the Bible? It is the record of this 
 long Evolution. It is the literature growing 
 out of this Evolution—all stages of the Evolu- 
 tion. Some of these books spring from its 
 earliest and crudest stage; some from a stage 
 a step higher; and others from the various 
 stages, on to the last. Do you wonder, there- 
 fore, that not all parts of the Bible teach the 
 same religion or the same morality? There 
 is hardly a thoughtful, candid person to be 
 found who has not read things in the Old Tes- 
 tament that have shocked him. He has said 
 to himself, Can it be possible that a divine and 
 infallible book can contain such teachings, as 
 the word of God? Many a man, finding these 
 things in the Bible—for they cannot be hidden 
 from sight—has turned away in disgust and 
 said, I will have nothing more to do with such 
 a book, or the religion that it enjoins. It was 
 these things that gave such power to Mr. In- 
 gersoll’s arraignments of the Bible. See, he 
 said, these things are your Bible. These things 
 are the teachings of your infallible book. 
 These things are your divine religion. What 
 answer could be made? None, by men who 
 held to the common doctrines of Bible infalli- 
 bility ; who held that all parts of the Bible are 
 of equal inspiration and equal authority. The 
 only answer that could be made, or that can 
 
THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 139 
 
 be made, is that which intelligent and candid 
 Bible scholarship offers, which shows us that 
 the Bible is not all one book; its parts are not 
 all of equal inspiration or value; it is an evolu- 
 tion; it represents all stages of the moral and 
 religious progress of the Hebrew people, from 
 polytheism to Christianity; from God, a God 
 of vengeance and cruelty and blood, to God, a 
 being of justice and love, a Father in Heaven; 
 from the ethics which says, Hate and kill your 
 enemies, to the ethics which says, Love your 
 enemies; from Samson and his ideals of lust, 
 cunning, and physical strength, to Jesus with 
 his ideals of purity, pity, and brotherhood. 
 As soon as we fully grasp this idea of 
 growth, progress, evolution in the religion of 
 the Bible, we are no longer troubled by the 
 low views of God and morality which we find 
 in certain Scriptural books. They are what 
 we expect. We see that they are the natural 
 and necessary products of their time. They 
 show us the early stage of the evolutionary 
 process; they show us what later the Jewish 
 people themselves outgrew and passed by. 
 Nobody has made this clearer than Jesus. 
 Jesus says: “Ye have heard that it hath been 
 said (by men in the earlier time), ‘Thou shalt 
 love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy.’ But 
 I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them 
 
140 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 that curse you, and do good to them that hate 
 you.” ‘Ye have heard that it hath been said, 
 ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’; 
 but the time for that has passed by. I say un- 
 to you, Resist not evil.”” Now which of these 
 teachings are we to follow, the earlier and 
 lower, found in Exodus and Deuteronomy? or 
 the later and higher, found in the Sermon on 
 the Mount? We cannot follow both. No, the 
 only thing which can save us from utter con- 
 fusion in interpreting the Bible, is a recogni- © 
 tion of the fact that it is an evolution. It is 
 not all of equal value. It is not all of equal 
 authority. Some parts are outgrown, as Jesus 
 said. Some parts represent the child-stage of 
 religion and ethics; other parts represent that 
 which is somewhat more mature and complete, 
 on to that which is highest and best in the 
 great prophets and in Jesus. Here, where the 
 evolution reaches its summit, we have teach- 
 ings which can never be outgrown. Here we 
 have truth which will be food for the moral 
 and spiritual life of man forever. 
 
 And now we see where Jesus stands in this 
 evolution. He is its consummation and crown. 
 
 It is important to notice how all intellectual 
 and moral progress in the world is promoted. 
 
 1 See “The Origin and Character of the Bible,” 
 chapters xix., XxX., XXi., xxii. 
 
THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 141 
 
 It is always promoted by means of men su- 
 perior to their fellows. Men of larger knowl- 
 edge or deeper insight into truth rise up and 
 become leaders of their time. They are lights 
 which others follow. 
 
 In the history of Israel, the prophets were 
 the men who led the advance. Nearly every 
 generation had its prophet souls, men of pre- 
 eminent moral earnestness, men of faith, men 
 of conscience, men of religious zeal and fervor, 
 men of clearer vision of God and eternal 
 things than their fellows. 
 
 These prophets differed greatly in intellect- 
 ual ability, in moral attainments, and in 
 spiritual insight. But they were all religious- 
 ly in advance of the people, and so they were 
 able to lead the nation on. In the prophets the 
 religious genius of Israel rose to its highest. 
 Some of these prophets were lofty souls, the 
 ' purity and nobleness of whose character and 
 the moral splendor of whose teachings have 
 shed undying lustre upon Palestine, and con- 
 ferred inestimable benefit upon the race. 
 Among the greatest we may name Hosea, Mi- 
 cah, Jeremiah, the first and the second Isaiah, 
 and Paul. But the greatest of all was Jesus. 
 In him the matchless plant of Hebrew proph- 
 ecy reached its tallest and finest blossom. 
 
 When the Greek race, whose genius for art, 
 
142 EVOLUTION AND EKELIGION 
 
 for poetry, and for phlosophy was the highest 
 in the ancient world, produced its best, is it 
 any wonder that it gave to mankind a Phidias, 
 a Sophocles, and a Plato? So when the He- 
 brew race, whose genius for religion was the 
 highest in the ancient world, produced its 
 best, is it any wonder that it gave to mankind 
 an Isaiah, a Paul, and a Jesus? Thus we see 
 what is the place that Evolution assigns to 
 Jesus. It lifts him up to the position of the 
 greatest of the Hebrew prophets, and that 
 means to the place of the greatest of the 
 religious teachers of the ancient world. Was 
 there ever conferred upon man a more ex- 
 alted honor than this? 
 
 And now what are we to say concerning the 
 religion of Jesus? Does Evolution disturb 
 ' that? 
 
 Of course in order to answer this question 
 we must inquire, What was the religion of 
 Jesus? 
 
 We have found our past studies of Evolu- 
 tion pushing everything pertaining to any sup- 
 posed fall of the race in Adam quite back into 
 the realm of legend and myth. The race did 
 not have its origin six thousand years ago, but 
 many times six thousand. Man was not 
 created in an exalted and perfect condition, 
 from which he has fallen. He was created in 
 
THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 143 
 
 a low and imperfect condition, from which he 
 has risen. 
 
 Where shall we go to find the religion of 
 Jesus? Some tell us to the creeds. But why 
 to the creeds? Did he write them? Most of 
 the creeds were written quite in modern times. 
 The oldest creeds we have are the Athanasian 
 Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the so-called 
 Apostles’ Creed. When were they written? 
 All of them in dark ages, when Christianity 
 had wandered far away from the teachings of 
 Christ; not one of them within three hundred 
 years of the Master’s time. It is the impres- 
 sion of many that at least the so-called 
 Apostles’ Creed goes back to the time of the 
 apostles. But this is a mistake. Dean Stan- 
 ley says that about all we know concerning its 
 origin is that the apostles had nothing what- 
 ever to do with it. We do, however, know 
 something more than this. We know that it 
 came into existence centuries this side of the 
 apostolic age. 
 
 Where, then, shall we go to find out what 
 was the religion of Jesus? Plainly, we must 
 go to the New Testament. But to what part of 
 the New Testament? Some parts were writ- 
 ten earlier than others. Some parts tell us 
 directly about Jesus; some do not. It is clear 
 that to get closest to Jesus, we must go to the 
 
144 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 Gospels. But here again there is a difference. 
 Probably the earliest of the Gospels is Mark. 
 Next in time to Mark come Matthew and Luke. 
 John is very late. So, then, we must go to 
 Mark, Matthew, and Luke. 
 
 What, then, does the Sermon on the Mount 
 contain—this completest setting forth of his 
 religious doctrine that Jesus makes anywhere? 
 
 \ Its great central thought is the Fatherhood 
 of God and the Brotherhood of Man. God is 
 our Father. We are all brothers. Therefore 
 we must live like brothers, and love like bro- 
 thers, and be kind and forgiving and helpful 
 to one another like brothers. We must be pure 
 in heart, we must be peaceable, we must be 
 merciful, we must love even our enemies, we 
 must be sincere, we must do nothing to be seen 
 of men, we must offer to God deeds not words, 
 lives not professions. This is the religion of 
 Jesus, as found in the fullest description that 
 he anywhere gives of it. Could a religion be 
 simpler? Could any be more profound? Could 
 ‘any be more beautiful? Could any be nobler? 
 Could any be more uplifting to humanity? 
 Could any be farther removed from the creeds 
 and theologies taught in his name? 
 
 Turn from the Sermon on the Mount to 
 other parts of the Gospels, and what do we 
 find? In one place Jesus gives an epitome of 
 
THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 145 
 
 his religion —a statement in three sentences 
 of what is the sum and substance of it all. 
 What is it? Love. Love to God and to one’s 
 neighbor. That is the whole. That is re- 
 ligion! How it compasses within its wide 
 arms all heaven and allearth. Yes, and every 
 possible hell! How it transforms earth into 
 heaven! and insures that no hell shall fail to 
 be transformed into heaven at last! 
 
 From the very beginning of his ministry, 
 and all through, Jesus declares that his work 
 is to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth. 
 What is the kingdom of heaven? It is purity 
 and love and righteousness. It is the reign 
 of God in the soul of man. His disciples asked 
 him who was the greatest. He answered, He 
 that serves. He took a child and set it in their 
 midst and said, “Of such is the kingdom of 
 heaven.” He taught that true worship is wor- 
 - ship of the Father in spirit and in truth. 
 
 Much of his teaching was in parables. What 
 do these parables teach? The scheme of 
 theology found to-day in the leading creeds of 
 Christendom? Nothing of the kind. They 
 teach a practical religion of love and mercy 
 and good deeds. The greatest of the parables 
 are those of the Good Samaritan and the 
 Prodigal Son. The lesson of the Parable of 
 the Good Samaritan is, that we make a mis- 
 
 on_—e-_ 
 
146 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 take if we think that the best religion in this 
 world is confined to those who bear the re- 
 ligious names and occupy the prominent 
 places in religious circles. The priest who 
 was an accepted religious teacher, and the 
 Levite who belonged to the religious set, had 
 less real religion than the poor despised 
 Samaritan; for they both passed by the poor 
 robbed and wounded man with only looks of 
 pity, but the Samaritan ministered to him 
 with deeds of pity and service. | 
 What is the religion of the Parable of the 
 Prodigal Son? It, too, is very far from the 
 religion of the generally accepted creeds and 
 theologies. A boy goes away from home, and 
 falls into wild and evil ways. At last he reaps 
 what he sows, as all men must sooner or later, 
 and he falls into misery and want. Those 
 who have been his companions in his sin 
 desert him when misfortune comes. He has 
 no money, no friends; his ‘distress is great. 
 Now he sees the evil of his ways. Bitterness 
 and sorrow and contrition fill his soul. In his 
 misery, he remembers his home and his father. 
 Does his father still love him? Can his father 
 forgive him? The best that is in him speaks 
 and says, “I will arise and go to my father, 
 and I will say, Father, I have sinned against 
 heaven and before thee, and am no more 
 
THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 147 
 
 worthy to be called thy son; make me as one 
 of thy hired servants.” ‘So he arose and went 
 to his father. What did he find? Had the 
 fountains of love gone dry in the father’s 
 heart? They know not a father’s love who 
 think that. The father, waiting, waiting for 
 his return, “saw him while yet he was a great 
 way off, ran, fell on his neck, and kissed him,” 
 exclaiming with a joy which words could but 
 poorly express, “This, my son, was dead, and 
 is alive; was lost, and is found.” Such is the 
 tender and beautiful story. 
 
 Such, then, is the religion of Jesus, as we 
 find it in the Gospels which take us nearest to 
 him. Such, according to the earliest and best 
 witnesses, and according to the testimony of 
 his own words, is Christianity as Christ 
 preached it and lived it. It is no scheme. It 
 depends for its truth upon no Adam. The 
 religion of Jesus is spiritual, ethical, of the 
 heart, of the conscience. It is love, it is wor- 
 ship, it is duty, it is service, it is the pure 
 heart and the right life, and it is nothing else. 
 
 What attitude does Evolution take toward 
 such a religion? Does it oppose it? Does it 
 disturb it? On the contrary, such a religion 
 is exactly in line with Evolution in its higher 
 aspects. The world’s evolution reaches its 
 highest in man. Man’s evolution reaches its 
 
148 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 highest in the moral and spiritual. The moral 
 and spiritual tends ever toward such a re- 
 ligion as that of Jesus as its highest possible 
 expression and embodiment. 
 
 Jesus taught the universal religion, the eter- 
 nal religion, because he taught the religion of 
 the soul, the religion of love and life. Toward 
 that religion Judaism had been tending for 
 centuries. Much that he taught had been 
 taught by others before him. Indeed much 
 had been taught in other lands, outside of 
 Palestine—by great spiritual seers and pro- 
 phets in India and Greece and elsewhere. But 
 he saw with a clearer vision than it had been 
 given any other to see. So he was able to 
 plant a banner higher up the hills of God than 
 any other had done. He was able to inaugu- 
 rate a religious movement more elevating, 
 more quickening, more fruitful than any other 
 in the history of the world. 
 
 It is instructive to notice that there has 
 never been any conflict between science and 
 the religion of Jesus. The battles which 
 science has had to fight have been with the 
 theologies which have arisen and attached 
 themselves to the religion of Jesus, but were 
 no part of it. The new astronomy taught by 
 Copernicus and Galileo had a long battle to 
 fight with theology. So had physics when it 
 
THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 149 
 
 came on the scene. So had geology. Evo- 
 lution is fighting such a battle now. So is bib- 
 lical scholarship. But none of these battles 
 have ever disturbed the religion of Jesus. 
 That religion was at home under the old; it is 
 at home under the new. It sees in science and 
 enlarged knowledge friends, not enemies. The 
 more of light, the more of God. 
 
 Why has the Christian church wandered so 
 far away from the religion of Jesus? Why is 
 its teaching to-day so much below that of the 
 Master? 
 
 The explanation is partly, at least, in the 
 greatness of Jesus. He was so much ahead of 
 his time. 
 
 The world to-day in art is not up to Michael 
 Angelo. The world to-day in poetry is not up 
 to Shakespeare. The reason is, these men 
 were so great. They were so far in advance 
 of nearly all the rest of mankind. But the fact 
 that they lived and wrought has been a power 
 ever since to move the world forward. Only, 
 the world is so large—the mass to be moved is 
 so great! 
 
 So with Jesus. Was it to be expected that the 
 world could be brought up to him in a cen- 
 tury, or in twenty centuries? Yet it is on the 
 way. And his influence is perhaps the might- 
 iest single force in helping on the advance. 
 
150 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 We talk about Christianity having early 
 conquered the Roman Empire; and later con- 
 quering the barbarian peoples of central and 
 northern Europe. But as a fact these so- 
 called conquests were generally compromises, 
 and half-surrenders. Christianity “stooped 
 to conquer.” She gave to the “conquered” 
 countries the Christian name, but she accepted 
 much of their heathenism in return, and in- 
 corporated it into her own thought, institu- 
 tions, forms of worship, and life. Perhaps 
 under the circumstances this was inevitable. 
 Possibly it was the only way in which the 
 Christianizing process could begin at all— 
 the only way in which the first step could be 
 taken toward the purer truth and higher life 
 which the religion of Jesus meant. But for 
 the time being it seriously corrupted Chris- 
 tianity. It left the world with a vast deal of 
 religion calling itself by the Christian name 
 which in reality was nearly as much heathen 
 as Christian. It was inevitable that sooner or 
 later Christianity should awake to conscious- 
 ness of the fact that it was corrupted with 
 this heathen element, and must purify itself. 
 Its first great awakening in this direction was 
 the Protestant Reformation. The work begun 
 then did not stop, but has continued, and is 
 going forward in our day on a vastly larger 
 
THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 151 
 
 scale, with more radical and thorough-going 
 ends in view, and impelled by more numerous 
 forces of enlightenment, than ever before. 
 Now, for the first time since the age of the 
 apostles, the world is getting a considerable 
 body of churches planted distinctly upon the 
 highest ethical and spiritual teaching of 
 Jesus—that which he himself declared to be 
 the centre and soul of his religion—namely, 
 God’s Fatherhood and Man’s Brotherhood, or 
 Love to God and Love to Man. These facts 
 fill the future with hope. This work of puri- 
 fication and enlightenment will go on. Noth- 
 ing can stop it. All the forces of progress are 
 on its side. Sometime Christianity will bef 
 really Christian. 
 
 The cry is raised in many quarters in our 
 day, Back to Jesus! At first thought this 
 seems like acry of retrogression. I think it is 
 not. I think it is a summons to an se wal 
 It is a summons back from smaller leaders to 
 a greater; above all, it is a summons away 
 from those theologies which have so obscured 
 and weighted the religion of Jesus, back to 
 that religion itself, as it shines in the teach- 
 ings and life of the Master. Such a going 
 back is a real going forward. It is a going 
 back to get a clearer vision, a higher inspira- 
 tion, a nobler banner, with which to press on. 
 
152 EVOLUTION AND EELIGION 
 
 No, the work of Jesus is not done. The in- 
 fluence of his religion is only in ‘its morning. 
 The lovers of Jesus need not fear. The world 
 is moving on, and in a sense deeper than ever 
 before Jesus is its leader. 
 
 The study of the evolution of religion has 
 many lessons to teach. 
 
 One is a lesson of hope. All evolution is at 
 once a history and a prophecy. The law which 
 has been operative in the past we know will be 
 operative in the future. The world cannot go 
 permanently backward. 
 
 We are sometimes tempted to think there is 
 no evolution in connection with things re- 
 ligious because the evolution does not proceed 
 in straight lines, in all lands at once, and with 
 steady, unbroken progress through the cen- 
 turies. But no evolution proceeds in that way. 
 All forms of evolution on the globe have been 
 iregular — now fast, now slow, now pushing 
 forward in one direction, now in another, and 
 now seeming for a time to recede. Yet on the 
 whole there has been advance. Evolution, re- 
 ligious and other, is like a great river. Here 
 its path is straight, here it is tortuous; here its 
 current is strong, here it is sluggish; here 
 there is an eddy, with a backward flow. Yet 
 the river makes progress; it grows deeper and 
 wider as it advances; when it begins its career 
 
THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 153 
 
 in the mountains, it is a rill; when it pours its 
 waters into the sea, it is a great flood. 
 
 The fact that man’s moral and spiritual de- 
 velopment has been carried so far as we now 
 see, is a pledge that it will be completed. The 
 Eternal Wisdom will leave none of its great 
 tasks half done; especially this, the highest, 
 the crowning one of all. The evolution of re- 
 ligion means that man will at last be man. 
 The inheritances from the brute that still 
 cling to him will one day be subdued and put 
 under the control of reason and conscience. 
 Sometime he will learn to love God and his 
 brother. Then earth will be heaven. 
 
 One important lesson which the study of 
 religious evolution has to teach us all is, that 
 real progress can never be made by ignoring 
 the past. The true radical is the true con- 
 servative; the true conservative is the true 
 radical. We cannot cut ourselves off from 
 the past without death. “The past of religion, 
 as of all other things, is the great mother 
 breast which holds the nourishment of hu- 
 manity, present and future.” Those whom 
 God has placed at the front of the religious 
 progress of our time, need above all others 
 to learn this lesson. If we would go forward 
 safely, we must keep our communication open 
 toward the past; not to retreat to positions 
 
154 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 rightly left behind, but to draw needed sup- 
 plies for our further advance. 
 
 Not, as some would have us believe, by 
 lightly throwing away the Bible because it 
 is not all good, but by using it wisely, passing 
 by its dross and treasuring up its gold; not 
 by turning away from Jesus because myths 
 and legends have sprung up around his name, 
 and because some have worshipped him as 
 God, but by seeing him as he is, by recogniz- 
 ing his greatness, and by making him our 
 friend, our teacher, and our brother; not by 
 surrendering prayer because prayer may lend 
 itself to superstition and pharisaism, but by 
 praying more sincerely, reasonably, and nobly; 
 not by giving up the church because it has 
 sometimes been employed for unworthy ends, 
 but by putting it to the high uses of which it 
 is capable; not by casting aside all religious 
 forms, but by purifying them, and filling them 
 with sincerity and life — shall we be able to 
 make our religion a real evolution, and build 
 up for ourselves and our children a faith bet- 
 ter than that of the past. 
 
 Evolution teaches us, as no other thought | 
 can do, that the past belongs to us, a heritage 
 infinitely rich and precious. But it belongs 
 to us, not as a stream emptying itself into 
 the present as a pool, to stagnate and dry up 
 
THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 155 
 
 and breed disease and die. The past belongs 
 to us as a stream that must flow on through 
 the present into the future, to bless that. If 
 Evolution means receiving from what has 
 been, it no less means contributing to what 
 shall be. It means unselfishness. It means 
 giving. It means making ourselves willingly 
 and joyfully a part of God’s eternal order. 
 Evolution means a face set to the future, to- 
 ward which we press with faith and high pur- 
 pose. It means believing in some better thing, 
 and forever some better thing, for religion, for 
 man, and for the world; believing in it so 
 earnestly that we shall gladly make ourselves 
 co-workers with God to bring the consumma- 
 tion. 
 
APPENDIX I 
 
 THE BATTLE TO DRIVE EVOLU- 
 TION OUT OF THE SCHOOLS 
 
 STRENGTH OF THE ANTI-EVOLU- 
 TION FORCES 
 
 The widespread character and the amazing 
 strength of the movement to shut out by legis- 
 lative action all teaching of Evolution from 
 the state-aided universities, colleges, and pub- 
 lic schools of the nation, were pointed out in a 
 striking article in the New York Nation of 
 May 20, 1925. The following are some of the 
 facts cited in that article. | 
 
 “In July, 1924, the Rev. George L. Thorpe 
 of Corona, California, and others, petitioned 
 the California State Board of Public Instruc- 
 tion to throw out from the public schools and 
 State-supported colleges all textbooks imply- 
 ing or teaching the theory of Evolution. Did 
 the Board politely but promptly tell Mr. | 
 Thorpe to go back where he came from? It 
 did not. More than six months of dillydally- 
 ing, of playing with this serious matter, have 
 been allowed to pass and so far as we have 
 
THE BATTLE 157 
 
 been able to obtain knowledge, no decision 
 has yet been reached. The fundamentalist 
 strength is so great in Southern California 
 that there is much fear that this anti-evolu- 
 tionist movement, in one form or another, 
 under one guise or another will succeed; and 
 thus that the high-school students of the state 
 will be doomed to grow up in ignorance of 
 modern evolutionary science, with all this im- 
 plies, and the splendid scientific work of the 
 University of California will be ruined or 
 seriously curtailed. 
 
 “In Oklahoma, for more than two years it 
 has been impossible to teach the evolution 
 theory in the public schools. Tennessee has 
 just passed a similar law. In Florida the leg- 
 islature passed a resolution advising school 
 boards or trustees not to employ any instructor 
 who taught Darwinism, and a bill has been in- 
 troduced making such instruction unlawful. 
 In Texas the Board of Regents of the State 
 University has ordained that ‘no _ infidel, 
 atheist, or agnostic shall be employed in any 
 capacity in the University of Texas.’ Although 
 there are, of course, some evolutionists who 
 are atheists, any teacher of evolution, how- 
 ever firm a believer in God he might be, would 
 have hard sledding under the interpretations 
 of such a rule. In Kentucky and Texas the 
 
158 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 lower house of the legislature passed anti-evo- 
 lution bills, but the upper house failed to carry 
 the measure in Kentucky by the perilous mar- 
 gin of one vote. The Baptists of Kentucky 
 have voted to give no money to any school 
 teaching Evolution. The North Carolina 
 Board of Education will not employ teachers 
 who believe in Evolution. Bills against the 
 teaching of Evolution are pending or about 
 to be presented in Mississippi, Georgia, West 
 Virginia, Arkansas, Iowa, Illinois, North Da- 
 kota, Minnesota, Oregon, and Arizona. 
 
 “Throughout the entire South and South- 
 west, fundamentalist and anti-evolutionist 
 feeling is very strong. The Georgia Legisla- 
 ture recently held up an appropriation for 
 maintenance of a State Library on the avowed 
 ground that books on Evolution might be 
 found there. Dr. Henry Fox, Professor of 
 Biology at Mercer University, Macon, Georgia, 
 was forced to resign last October because he 
 was a believer in and taught the theory of 
 Evolution. 
 
 “The situation in Tennessee is acute and 
 interesting. Eagerly, fervently, with much 
 outpouring of eloquence, the legislature has — 
 decreed that any teacher in any school or 
 college supported in whole or in part by state 
 funds who shall teach ‘any theory that denies 
 
THE BATTLE 159 
 
 the story of the divine creation of man as 
 taught in the Bible, and teaches instead that 
 man has descended from a lower order of 
 animals,’ shall be subject to a fine of $100. 
 Amazing as it seems, this law was enacted 
 without a single protest from men in charge 
 of State Educational Institutions. A few 
 clergymen protested against it, it is good to 
 say; but the State Department of Education 
 was dumb, and there was never a word of 
 protest from the State University. 
 
 “Side by side with the effort to prohibit the 
 teaching of Evolution goes the parallel move- 
 ment to teach the creation story of the Book 
 of Genesis — disguised as the reading of the 
 Bible in the public schools. 
 
 “Against the powerfully beeanioed and sub- 
 sidized fundamentalist and anti-evolutionist 
 groups are ranged two active bodies of pro- 
 test—the American Association for the Ad- 
 vancement of Science and the Science League 
 of America. The former has appointed a com- 
 mittee which adopted resolutions condemning 
 the fundamentalist attack on science, and re- 
 affirming the faith of scientists in the theory 
 of Evolution. 
 
 “The other anti-fundamentalist and pro- 
 evolution group, the Science League of Amer- 
 ica, was founded in August, 1924, in San 
 
160 EVOLUTION AND KELIGION 
 
 Francisco, for the specific purpose of opposing 
 attacks on the teaching of Evolution, and for 
 the defense of scientific freedom. 
 
 Although the League is still young and reste! 
 it is already doing good work, and is rapidly 
 growing.” 
 
 Some of the men at the head of this Science 
 League of America are the following scien- 
 tists :-— 
 
 Dr. David Starr Jordan, Chancellor Emeri- 
 tus, Leland Stanford University; Dr. Harold 
 Heath, Professor of Geology, Leland Stanford 
 University; Dr. H. S. Reed, Professor of 
 Plant Physiology, University of California; 
 Dr. William E. Ritter, Zoologist, University 
 of California; Dr. Edgar L. Hewett, Director, 
 School American Research, Archiological In- 
 stitute of America; Dr. J. J. See, Astronomer 
 United States Navy; Luther Burbank, emi- 
 nent Naturalist, originator of new fruits, 
 flowers, etc.; Maynard Shipley, formerly 
 President of the Academy of Science, Seattle, 
 Washington. 
 
 In printed circulars sent out widely through 
 the country, the League makes the following ~ 
 statements and calls public attention to the 
 following facts: ‘‘No one denies that the Fun- 
 damentalist propaganda has resulted, during 
 the past five years, in the practical outlawry 
 
THE BATTLE 161 
 
 of the theory of Evolution as a basis of sci- 
 ence teaching in a number of states of the 
 Union. 
 
 “A teacher of many years’ experience 
 writes: ‘I realize the danger of permitting 
 organized theology to dictate the policies or 
 teachings in our public schools; and I have 
 observed with genuine alarm the sinister en- 
 croachments of prejudice and religious in- 
 tolerance. Public-school teachers now hardly 
 dare to have a mind of their own. How can 
 we expect courageous and independent thought 
 from students, if those who teach them dare 
 not think? How can we expect boys and girls 
 to love liberty if those who teach them are 
 mental slaves?’ 
 
 “An eminent educator writes: ‘I find that 
 the publishers have been effectively intimi- 
 dated by the fundamentalist agitation, for 
 they all are insisting upon high-school text- 
 books with Evolution left out.’ 
 
 “Not long ago Professor C. E. Fothergill 
 was compelled to resign his chair in Baylor 
 University, Waco, Texas, because he had told 
 his pupils that Noah’s Ark was not large 
 enough to contain a pair of every species of 
 animals on the earth (numbering 500,000). 
 
 “Is it no concern of the better educated 
 men and women of the United States that a 
 
162 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 pall of intellectual darkness is being drawn 
 over the heads of the people at large? Is legal 
 abolishment of freedom of research and teach- 
 ing in the South and West of no vital interest 
 to the people of the North and East? 
 
 ‘Besides their fervid activities in the South- 
 ern States, the fundamentalists are now work- 
 ing intensely in West Virginia, Minnesota, 
 North Dakota, Indiana, Arkansas, Missouri, 
 Arizona, Oregon, and California, and their 
 field of operation constantly grows. Not even 
 the northern seaboard Atlantic States, which 
 feel most safe from this propaganda, are 
 actually so; it must be remembered that a two- 
 thirds majority of the states can ultimately 
 pass an amendment to the Federal Constitu- 
 tion. 
 
 “We know that in many states the pro-fun- 
 damentalists form a majority of the citizenry. 
 In regard to other states, it should be re- 
 membered that on the issue of the Book of 
 Genesis versus Evolution—which is of course 
 the real issue—the fundamentalists would be 
 supported silently but systematically at the 
 polls by the Roman Catholic voters; for this . 
 Church, as everybody knows, is antagonistic 
 to the theory of transformism as applied to 
 man. Add to these groups many ‘plain citi- . 
 zens’ who, while more or less indifferent to 
 
THE BATTLE 163 
 
 theological doctrines, emotionally resent the 
 supposed imputation that they are ‘the de- 
 scendants of monkeys’ (the popular conception 
 of Darwinism), and you have a political force 
 to contend with which may well lead to out- 
 lawry of freedom of teaching even in states 
 where a more enlightened policy seems, to 
 some observers, to be invulnerable to the 
 attacks of fundamentalist opposition. If the 
 principle is once established that the ‘guesses’ 
 and ‘hypotheses’ of ultra orthodox bigots 
 should properly prevail over the findings of 
 scientists and educational experts—as is 
 claimed by the fundamentalists—the culture 
 of the Republic is doomed.” 
 
APPENDIX II 
 
 TESTIMONIES OF EMINENT SCIEN- 
 TISTS AS TO THE TRUTH OF EV0e 
 LUTION AND ITS REAL RELA- 
 TION TO RELIGION 
 
 (A) THE TRUTH AND IMPORTANCE OF Evo- 
 LUTION. 
 
 There is no higher scientific authority in 
 this country, if in the world, than the Ameri- 
 can Association for the Advancement of 
 Science. In view of the widespread misunder- 
 standing of the doctrine of Evolution, and the 
 effort made by ignorance and religious bigotry 
 to convince the American public that it is not 
 true science, but only a mere “guess,” and, 
 withal, hostile to religion, the Association 
 deemed it important in 1922 to make a public 
 declaration on the subject. Accordingly, in 
 January, 1923, the Council of the Association 
 published the following statement: 
 
 “The Council of the American Association 
 for the Advancement of Science has thought 
 it advisable to take formal action upon this 
 matter, in order that there may be no ground 
 for misunderstanding of the attitude of the 
 
TESTIMONIES 165 
 
 Association, which is one of the largest scien- 
 tific bodies in the world, with a membership 
 of more than 11,000 persons, including the 
 American authorities in all branches of sci- 
 ence. The following statements represent the 
 position of the council with regard to the 
 theory of Evolution: 
 
 1. “The Council of the Association affirms 
 that, so far as the scientific evidences of the 
 evolution of plants and animals and man are | 
 concerned, there is no ground whatever for 
 the assertion that these evidences constitute a 
 ‘mere guess.’ No scientific generalization is 
 more strongly supported by thoroughly tested 
 evidence than is that of Organic Evolution. 
 
 2. “The Council of the Association affirms 
 that the evidences in favor of the Evolution of 
 Man are sufficient to convince every scientist 
 of note in the world. These evidences are in- 
 creasing in number and importance every 
 year. 
 
 3. ‘The Council also affirms that the the- 
 ory of Evolution is one of the most potent of 
 the great influences for good that have thus 
 far entered into human experience; it has 
 promoted the progress of knowledge, it has 
 fostered unprejudiced inquiry, and it has 
 served as an invaluable aid in humanity’s 
 search for truth in many fields. 
 
166 EVOLUTION AND EELIGION 
 
 4. “The Council of the Association is con- 
 vinced that any legislation attempting to limit 
 the teaching of any scientific doctrine so well 
 established and so widely accepted by special- 
 ists as is the doctrine of Evolution, would be a 
 profound mistake, which could not fail to in- 
 jure and retard the advancement of knowl- 
 edge and of human welfare, by denying the 
 freedom of teaching and inquiry which is 
 essential to all progress.” 
 
 As supplementary to this powerful testi- 
 mony of the American Association for the Ad- 
 vancement of Science, we add the following 
 testimonies of eminent individual scien- 
 tists: — 
 
 Frederick A. Lucas, Honorary Director of 
 the American Museum of Natural History, 
 New York, is reported in the New York Times 
 of March 10, 1924, as saying: “The Evolution- 
 ary theory is accepted by all creditable scien- 
 tists to-day. It underlies all science, all 
 knowledge and all human thought of this age, 
 without an understanding of it one cannot 
 be educated.” 
 
 Professor John M. Coulter of the Univer- | 
 sity of Chicago is reported to have said before 
 a religious Congress in Chicago on April 28, 
 1925: “There is no longer any question as to 
 the fact of Evolution. No scientific conclu- 
 
TESTIMONIES 167 
 
 sion can be overthrown by ignorant opposi- 
 tion. Plants and animals have been pedigreed 
 under rigid control and observed in the act of 
 producing new species. It is safe to say that 
 the production of one species from another 
 has been demonstrated repeatedly, so that 
 there is no longer any question as to the fact 
 of Evolution.” New York Times, April 29, 
 1925. 
 
 Says Professor Edwin G. Conklin: ‘Not 
 only the structure but the functions of the 
 human body are fundamentally like those of 
 other animals. We are born, nourished and 
 develop, we reproduce, grow old and die, just 
 as do other mammals. Specific functions of 
 every organ are the same; drugs, diseases, in- 
 juries affect man as they do animals, and all 
 the wonderful advances of experimental medi- 
 cine are founded upon this fact. Development 
 from a fertilized egg to birth goes through 
 the same stages in man and other mammals 
 even to the repeating of gill slits, kidneys, 
 heart and blood vessels like those of fishes 
 and amphibians. Indeed, development from 
 the egg recapitulates some of the main stages 
 of Evolution — in it we see evolution repeated 
 before our eyes. . . . All the evidences 
 of evolution drawn from morphology, physi- 
 ology, embryology, paleontology, homology, 
 
Phat Dtrort, 
 
 168 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 heredity, variation, etc., speak for the evolu- 
 tion of man as much as for that of any other 
 organism. If evolution is true anywhere, it 
 is true also of man. . . . Everything 
 which speaks for the evolution of plants and 
 animals speaks plainly for the evolution of 
 man.” Evolution and the Bible, pp: 14, 
 Loy Los 
 
 It is not out of place to add the judgment of 
 the New York Times, as expressed editorially 
 on May 24, 1928: “When Mr. Bryan or any 
 one else calls for repudiation of the conception 
 of Evolution, he really calls upon scientific 
 students, teachers, and investigators to throw 
 away their chief tools. He might as well ask 
 them to give up thinking altogether as to give 
 up thinking and inquiring in terms of Evolu- 
 tion. Into every laboratory, every fruitful 
 experiment, every scientific expedition of the 
 past fifty years, the general theory of Evo- 
 lution has entered as a dominant factor. 
 Scientists do not debate it any more; they 
 instinctively accept it; it is as natural to them 
 as the air they breathe. Without it they would 
 be dazed, and feel that their work had lost - 
 direction and utility.” 
 (B) MISAPPREHENSIONS REGARDING EVOLU- 
 
 TION. 
 says Professor Edwin G. Conklin: “The 
 
TESTIMONIES 169 
 
 new opponents of Evolution make much of the 
 idea that Evolution is only a hypothesis or as 
 they prefer to call it, a ‘guess.’ Evolution is 
 a guess only in the same sense as the doctrine 
 of universal gravitation, or any other general- 
 ization of science, is a guess. But can one 
 honestly call that doctrine a ‘guess’ which is 
 supported by all the evidence available, which 
 continually receives additional support from 
 new discoveries, and which is not contradicted 
 by any scientific evidence? It is true that we 
 do not know as much as we would like to 
 know about the causes of Evolution (though 
 we know a good deal more than its opponents 
 assume), but the same may be said with re- 
 gard to the causes of gravitation, light, elec- 
 tricity, chemical affinities, life or any other 
 natural phenomenon. The problem of cause 
 is never finally solved by science. . . . A com- 
 mon misunderstanding is that man is descend- 
 ed from some existing species of anthropoid 
 ape and the latter from some existing species 
 of monkey and so on back to certain existing 
 species of lower animals. Of course this can- 
 not be true, for the whole organic world has 
 been evolving together. Monkeys, apes, and 
 men have descended from some common but 
 at present extinct ancestor. Existing apes 
 and monkeys are collateral relatives of man 
 
170 EVOLUTION AND LELELIGION 
 
 but not his ancestors; his cousins but not his 
 parents. . . . There has been evolution 
 in divergent lines. The human branch di- 
 verged from the anthropoid branch not less 
 than two million years ago, and since that 
 time man has been evolving in the direction 
 represented by existing human races; while 
 the apes have been evolving in the direction 
 represented by existing anthropoids. During 
 all this time men and apes have been growing 
 more unlike; and, conversely, the farther back 
 we go the more we should find them converg- 
 ing, until they meet in a common stock, which 
 should be intermediate between these two 
 stocks. . . . Present day apes and mon- 
 keys can not become men because they have 
 long since passed the parting of the ways 
 which led to these two different types. . 
 
 The resemblances between monkeys, apes, and 
 man are due to the inheritance of certain com- 
 mon traits which they have derived from a 
 common ancestor, just as the resemblances of 
 cousins are due to the inheritance of traits 
 from common grandparents.” Evolution and 
 the Bible, (1922), pp. 7, 8, 11-138. | 
 
 Professor R. C. Osburn, President of the 
 
 Ohio Academy of Science, in an address de- 
 livered before that body in Columbus on April 
 14, 1922, is reported to have declared: ‘There 
 
TESTIMONIES 171 
 
 is some disagreement among scientists as to 
 the method of Evolution. This constitutes 
 one of the many prevalent misconceptions 
 relative to the theory. When some scientists 
 refuse to accept the idea that men descended 
 from the monkey, many persons suppose that 
 thus they renounce belief in Evolution. They 
 do not. They merely refuse to accept one of 
 the many theories relative to the origin of 
 man. All scientists agree as to the fact of 
 Evolution.” New York Times, April 15, 1922. 
 
 Dr. J. Playfair McMurrick, Professor of 
 Anatomy in the University of Toronto, in his 
 presidential address at the opening of the 
 seventy-fifth meeting of the American Asso- 
 iation for the Advancement of Science, in 
 Cincinnati, December 27, 1922, declared that 
 the scientific doctrine of Evolution can never 
 be killed by legislation. He asserts that the 
 . doctrine of Evolution has supplied the guiding 
 clue to the flood of new knowledge which has 
 revolutionized life in recent years; most of the 
 modern scientific discoveries applying to hu- 
 man life would never have been made except 
 for the doctrine of Evolution. Continuing he 
 said: “Many make the mistake of supposing 
 that Evolution is wholly identical with Dar- 
 winism. The identity is only partial. Evo- 
 lution as a theory long antedates Darwin. 
 
 
 
172 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 What Darwin did was to give a convincing 
 explanation of how organic evolution might 
 have occurred. Darwin’s is the greatest name 
 in the history of Evolution; but much new 
 knowledge has been obtained since his day, 
 and much that compels scientists to adopt dif- 
 ferent conclusions from his regarding some 
 matters. But these new conclusions are not 
 repudiations of Evolution. As a fact the 
 evidence in favor of Evolution is many times 
 stronger than it was in Darwin’s time, and it 
 seems incredible that man as a reasoning being 
 should presume to doubt as to its validity. 
 Such doubts can be based only on ignorance 
 of the evidence or on unreasoning prejudice.” 
 
 (C) EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 
 
 Even John Wesley, the founder of Metho- 
 dism, saw nothing to which he felt any aver- 
 sion, and nothing that seemed to him inimical 
 to religion, in the thought of man as developed 
 from lower forms of life, even from apes. In 
 his Compendium of Natural Philosophy there 
 is a chapter entitled ‘‘A General View of the 
 Gradual Progression of Beings.” In this — 
 chapter Wesley says: “By what degrees does 
 Nature raise herself to man? . . . How 
 will she rectify this head of the lower animal 
 _ that is always inclined toward earth? How 
 
TESTIMONIES 173 
 
 change these paws into flexible arms? What 
 method will she make use of to transform 
 these crooked feet into skillful and supple 
 hands? . . . The ape is the rough draft 
 of man, a rude sketch, an imperfect represen- 
 tation, which nevertheless bears a resemblance 
 to man, and is the last creature that seems 
 to display the admirable progression of the 
 works of God. . . . Thereisa prodigious 
 number of continued links between the most 
 perfect man and the ape.” 
 
 Why should any follower of Wesley to-day, 
 after reading these words, regard Evolution 
 as atheistical or hostile to religion? 
 
 Says Professor Edwin G. Conklin: “Is it 
 any more degrading to hold that man was 
 made through a long line of animal ancestry 
 than to believe that he was made directly from 
 the dust of the ground? Surely the horse and 
 - the dog and the monkey belong to higher or- 
 ders of existence than do the clod and the 
 stone. This lowly origin does not destroy the 
 dignity of man; his real dignity consists not 
 in his origin but in what he is and in what he 
 may become.” Evolution and the Bible, 
 (1922), p. 20. 
 
 Says Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn: 
 “The moral principle in Evolution is that noth- 
 ing can be gained in the world without effort. 
 
174 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 The ethical principle inherent in evolution is 
 that only the best has a right to survive. The 
 spiritual principle in evolution is the evidence 
 of beauty, order, and design in the daily 
 myriads of miracles to which we owe our 
 existence. Evolution does not take God out 
 of the universe; but, on the contrary, it vastly 
 enlarges our conception of his action.” - 
 
 Says Professor Robert J. Millikan: “There 
 have been just two great influences in the 
 history of the world which have made good- 
 ness the outstanding characteristic in the con- 
 ception of God. The first influence was Jesus 
 of Nazareth; the second influence has been the 
 growth of modern science, and particularly 
 the growth of the theory of Evolution.” A 
 Scientist Confesses His Faith, (1928), p. 25. 
 
APPENDIX III 
 
 EVOLUTION INTERPRETED. ITS 
 TRUE AND DEEPER MEANING 
 
 “That was not first which was spiritual, but that 
 which is natural; and afterward that which is 
 spiritual.” 
 
 —St. Paul. 
 
 Ro RR Re 
 
 I, too, rest in faith 
 That man’s perfection is the crowning flower, 
 Toward which the urgent sap in life’s great tree 
 Is pressing,—seen in puny blossom now, 
 But in the world’s great morrows to expand 
 With broadest petals and with deepest glow.” 
 
 —George Eliot. 
 
 x + * *F 
 
 “The fossil strata show us that Nature be- 
 gan with rudimental forms, and rose to the 
 more complex as fast as the earth was fit for 
 their dwelling-place; and that the lower per- 
 ish as the higher appear. Very few of our 
 race can be said to be yet finished men. We 
 still carry sticking to us some remains of the 
 preceding inferior quadruped organizations. 
 We call these millions men; but they are not 
 
176 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 yet men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to 
 get free, man needs all the music that can be 
 brought to disengage him. If Love, red Love, 
 with tears and joy; if Want with its. scourge; 
 if War with its cannonade; if Christianity 
 with charity; if Trade with its money; if Art 
 with its portfolios; if Science with her tele- 
 graph through the deeps of space and time, 
 can set his dull nerves throbbing, and by loud 
 taps on the tough chrysalis can break its walls, 
 and let the new creature emerge erect and 
 free— make way and sing paean! The age 
 of the quadruped is to go out — the age of the 
 Brain and the Heart is to come in.’”—Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson. 
 
 “The conviction is steadily gaining ground 
 that the fact of Evolution will have to be ac- 
 cepted. In a scientific age the Genesis story 
 of creation cannot be received as history, but 
 only as poetry or as a dream of early man. 
 There was not, for instance, a certain Monday 
 when there was in all the world, no single sun © 
 or moon or shining star, and then a following 
 Tuesday when lo, the sun shone, and the moon 
 gave forth its light, and the heavens were 
 studded with stars. There was not a certain 
 Tuesday when there was, in all the world, no 
 
EVOLUTION INTERPRETED 177 
 
 Single tree or flower or blade of grass, and 
 then a following Wednesday when gigantic 
 redwood lifted their branches three hundred 
 feet into the air, and alpine lilies appeared on 
 every mountainside, and grass grew in every 
 valley. There was not a certain Wednesday 
 when there was, in all the seas, no living crea- 
 ture, and then a following Thursday when the 
 waters swarmed with fishes. There was not 
 a certain Thursday when there was, on any 
 continent, no single lion or tiger or woolly 
 rhinoceros, and then a following Friday when 
 animals of every description roamed the 
 forests and appeared upon the plains. There 
 was not a certain Friday when there was, in 
 all the world, no single human being, and then 
 a following Saturday when a full-grown man 
 appeared. Everything that is came from 
 something that was. Everything that was 
 came from something that was before that, 
 and before that, and before that. No man or 
 mountain, no lion or lichen, no fish or flower 
 was ever created outright. Everything has 
 evolved, higher forms of life from lower forms 
 of life, and these lower forms from other 
 forms lower still. That is the belief of in- 
 creasing numbers of men who have devoted 
 a lifetime to study of the evidence. And so, 
 the conviction grows that however little we 
 
178 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 may yet know about the origin of species, the 
 fact of evolution will have to be reckoned with 
 by intelligent persons. 
 
 “What is the bearing of this fact upon re- 
 ligious faith? I shall venture to suggest not 
 only that man may believe in evolution and 
 still believe in God, but that a convinced evolu- 
 tionist may find in the conception of evolution 
 a positive support for his religious faith. 
 
 “Nothing could be farther from the truth 
 than the suggestion that ‘Evolution is an in- 
 vention whereby it is hoped to get rid of God.’ 
 In one of his last letters Darwin himself de- 
 clared, ‘I have never been an atheist in the 
 sense of denying the existence of God’. . 
 Why should anyone contemplate the fact of 
 Evolution with alarm? Far from banishing 
 or even belittling God, it but adds to his glory. 
 Far from degrading or even diminishing man, 
 it but reveals his uniqueness, his imperishable 
 significance. Far from destroying religion, it 
 fortifies it. And what a mighty stimulus it 
 brings to the most daring hopes of mankind! 
 The hope that though a man die, yet shall he 
 live—how it kindles that! The hope that the 
 dreams of prophetic spirits will yet be realized 
 in a diviner civilization, the kingdom of God 
 —how it lights up that!”—Ernest Fremont 
 Tittle, The Christian Century, June 11, 1925. 
 
EVOLUTION INTERPRETED 179 
 
 A fire-mist and a planet,— 
 A crystal and a cell,— 
 A jelly fish and a saurian, 
 And caves where cavemen dwell; 
 Then a sense of law and beauty, 
 And a face turned from the clod,— 
 Some call it Evolution, 
 Others call it God. 
 
 A haze on the far horizon, 
 The infinite tender sky, 
 
 The rich ripe tint of the corn-fields 
 And the wild geese sailing high,— 
 And all over the upland and lowland 
 
 The charm of the golden rod,— 
 Some of us call it autumn, 
 And others call it God. 
 
 Like tides on the crescent seabeach, 
 When the moon is new and thin, 
 Into our hearts high yearnings, 
 Come welling and surging in,— 
 Come from the mystic ocean 
 Whose rim no foot has trod,— 
 Some of us call it Longing, 
 And others call it God. 
 
 A picket frozen on duty,— 
 A mother starved for her brood,— 
 Socrates drinking the hemlock, 
 And Jesus on the rood; 
 And millions who humble and nameless 
 The straight hard pathway plod,— 
 Some call it Consecration, 
 And others call it God. 
 —wWilliam H. Carruth. 
 
180 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 He hides within the lily, » 
 A strong and tender Care, 
 That wins the earth-born atoms 
 To glory of the air; 
 He weaves the shining garments 
 Unceasingly and still, 
 Along the quiet waters, 
 In niches of the hill. 
 
 O Toiler of the lily, 
 Thy touch is in the Man! 
 No leaf that dawns to petal 
 But hints the angel-plan: 
 The flower-horizon open, 
 The blossom vaster shows; 
 We hear thy wide world echo, 
 ‘See how the lily grows!’ 
 
 Shy yearnings of the savage, 
 Unfolding, thought by thought, 
 To holy lives are lifted, 
 To visions fair are wrought: 
 The races rise and cluster, 
 And evils fade and fall, 
 Till chaos blooms to beauty, 
 Thy purpose crowning all! 
 
 —William C. Gannett. 
 
 The One Life thrilled the star-dust through 
 In nebulous masses whirled, 
 
 Until, globed like a drop of dew, 
 Shone out a new-made world. 
 
EVOLUTION INTERPRETED 
 
 The One Life on the ocean shore, 
 Through primal ooze and slime, 
 
 Crept slowly on from less to more 
 Along the ways of time. 
 
 The One Life in the jungles old, 
 From lowly, creeping things, 
 Did ever some new form unfold,— 
 
 Swift feet or soaring wings. 
 
 The One Life all the ages through 
 Pursued its wondrous plan, 
 
 Till, as the tree of promise grew, 
 It blossomed into Man. 
 
 The One Life reacheth onward still! 
 As yet no eye may see 
 
 The far-off fact man’s dream fulfil,— 
 The glory yet to be. 
 
 181 
 
 —Minot J. Savage. 
 

 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 The following works are among the many 
 which will be found useful to the student of 
 Evolution and of its relation to Humanity and 
 Religion. Those most useful to the general 
 reader are marked with a star: 
 
 *Darwin, Charles, “Origin of Species” 
 
 *Darwin, Charles, “Descent of Man” 
 
 *Darwin, Charles, “Animals and Plants under Do- 
 mestication” 
 
 *Huxley, T. H., “Man’s Place in Nature” 
 
 Wallace, Alfred R., “Darwinism” 
 
 *Kellogg, Vernon, ‘Darwinism To-day” 
 
 *Kellogg, Vernon, “Evolution” 
 
 *Jordan and Kellogg, “Evolution and Animal Life” 
 
 *Jordan, D. S., “War and the Breed” 
 
 McCulloch, O. C., “The Tribe of Ishmael” 
 
 *Nicolai, G. C., “The Biology of War” 
 
 *Poulton and Others, “Fifty Years of Darwinism” 
 
 “Thomson, J. Arthur, “Heredity” 
 
 *Wilson, E. B., “The Cell in Development and In- 
 heritance”’ 
 
 Davenport, Ch., “Heredity in Relation to Eugenics” 
 
 *Thomson, J. Arthur, “The System of Animate Na- 
 ture” 
 
 Castle, W. E., “Genetics and Eugenics” 
 
 *Conklin, E. G., “Heredity and Environment in the 
 Development of Man” 
 
 Crampton, H. E., “The Doctrine of Evolution” 
 
 *Dickinson, G. L., “Religion” 
 
 183 
 
184 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
 
 Doncaster, L., “Evolution and Incarnation” 
 Downing, E. R., “The Third and Fourth Generation” 
 *Drummond, Henry, “The Ascent of Man” 
 Dugdale, R. L., “The Jukes” 
 Fiske, John, “Darwinism and other Essays” 
 Geddes & J. A. Thompson, “Evolution” 
 Gulick, J. T., “Evolution, Racial and Habitudinal” 
 Haldane, J. S., “The New Physiology” 
 *Hobhouse, L. T., “Morals in Evolution” 
 *Holmes, S. J., “The Trend of the Race” 
 Iverach, James, “Christianity and Evolution” 
 Joly, J., “The Birth-Time of the World” 
 Kropotkin, P., “Mutual Aid a Factor in Evolution” 
 Haldane, J. S., “Life and Finite Individuality” 
 Lull, R. S., “Organic Evolution” 
 *Osborn, H. F., “From the Greeks to Darwin” 
 Otto, R., “Naturalism and Religion” 
 Pettigrew, J. B., “Design in Nature’ 
 Poulton, E. B., “Charles Darwin and the Theory of 
 Natural Selection” 
 Russell, E. S., “Form and Function” 
 Scott, W. B., “The Theory of Evolution” 
 Simpson, James Y., “The Spiritual Interpretation of 
 Nature” 
 Spencer, Herbert, “First Principles” 
 Stephen, Leslie, “Ethics and the Struggle for Exist- 
 ence” 
 Strong, Charles A., ‘Why the Mind has a Body” 
 *Thomson, J. A., “The Bible of Nature” 
 *Thomson, J. A., “Darwinism and Human Life” with 
 other essays 
 Trotter, W., “Instincts of the Herd in Peace and 
 War” 
 Voisin, A., “The Evolution Theory” 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 185 
 
 Heckel, E., “The History of Creation” 
 
 *Huxley, T. H., “Critiques and Addresses” 
 
 Darwin, F., “Life and Letters of Charles Darwin” 
 Jordan, D. S., “‘The Heredity of Richard Roe” 
 

 

 

 
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