' • « -v f , , fHii: '• ri: H-; BT 701 .067 1908 Orr , James, 1844-1913. God's image in man and its defacement in the light of l Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/godsimageinmanit00orrj_1 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN AND ITS DEFACEMENT GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN AND ITS DEFACEMENT IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN DENIALS BY JAMES ORR, D.D. PROFESSOR OF APOLOGETICS AND SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY UNITED FREE CHURCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW 0 ! (1 1 i L. V FOURTH EDITION I NEW YORK A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON 3 and 5 WEST i 8th STREET 1908 Being the Lectures on the L. P. Stone Foundation , Princeton Theological Seminary , N.y.y U.S.A. , i9°3"I9°4 Edinburgh : T. and A, Constable, Printers to His Majesty PREFACE The lectures in this volume were delivered on the L. P. Stone Foundation before the professors and students of Princeton Theological Seminary, from September 28 to October 3, 1903. They are now published in accordance with the desire of the Faculty. Additional matter, with references to books and articles which have appeared since the delivery of the lectures, are put in footnotes and in the Notes at the end. I have to express my thanks to the Faculty and students of Princeton Seminary for the great courtesy with which they received the lectures. The lines of doctrine followed in the lectures are the same as those laid down in my volume on The Christian View of God and the Worlds with parts of which this book may be compared. They run counter, I am well aware, to many currents of modern opinion, even in Christian VI GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN circles. If any are stumbled on this account, I can only plead that I must speak as I believe. I confess that the newer tendency to wholesale surrender of vital aspects of Christian doctrine at the shrine of what is regarded as 4 the modern view of the world ’ appears to me graver than it does to many. The modern view of the world — which is in reality not one view, but a congeries of conflicting and often mutually irreconcilable views — must, it is assumed, be accepted in the first place ; the view we take of Christianity must adapt itself to this, and the doctrines of Christianity must take their chance, if they come into collision with its findings. But there is another standpoint possible. It seems to me to be truer to say that, in a multitude of respects, the Christian view of the world is not the so- called modern view ; in principle, in fact, is irreconcilable with it ; and we ought to have the courage to avow this, and take the consequences. I do not say that the Christian view is irrecon¬ cilable with true science or sound philosophy — that it is impossible for a believing man who is PREFACE VI! at the same time a thinking man to hold ; but it is irreconcilable with many of the theories that profess to be based on science and philosophy, and is not capable of assimilation with these. We all acknowledge this in connection with the Materialisms, the Monisms, the Agnosticisms, the Pantheisms, that seek to supplant the Chris¬ tian conception ; but I would carry the principle a good deal further — into the region of the doctrines dealt with in these lectures. How far I have succeeded — and no one is more conscious of the imperfections of my treatment than myself — the reader must be left to form his own opinion. In the variety of views and reasonings that are presented, some food for reflection, at any rate, may be suggested. My thanks are due to Ebenezer Russell, Esq., Glasgow, for valuable aid in the revision of the proofs. JAMES ORR. October 1905. CONTENTS i THE CONFLICT OF BIBLICAL AND MODERN VIEWS OF MAN AND SIN - THE ISSUES STATED Aversion to Doctrines of the Gospel founded on altered views of their Presuppositions. The Biblical Views of God, Man, and Sin, met by a Counter-theory of the World and Man. Scientific Monism (Haeckel, etc.). Change on Doctrine of God. On Doctrines of Man and Sin. Effect on Christianity. Lectures to discuss Relations of Doctrines of Man and Sin to Modern Anthropological Theories. Extent of the Antagonism. Evolu¬ tionary View of the Origin of Man (Haeckel, Fiske). Conflict with Biblical Doctrine in respect : i . of the Nature of Man ; 2. of the Original Integrity of Man; 3. of the Origin, Nature, and Effects of Sin. Idealistic Evolutionism. Incompatibility with Christian View. Reply that while Ecclesiastical ‘Dogmas’ fall, the real Essence of Christianity is untouched. Fallacy of this : 1. Not Ecclesiastical Christianity alone, but the Christianity of the New Testament (Apostolic Gospel) falls; 2. Christ’s own Teaching is Subverted. Essence of Apostolic Christianity in Consciousness of Redemption through Jesus Christ. The Infinite Value of the Soul in Christianity. Humanity as Receptive of the Divine in Christianity. The Cross and Human Sin. The opposing Views Irreconcilable, ..... 3-30 X GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN II SCRIPTURE AND SCIENCE ON THE NATURE OF MAN - THE IMAGE OF GOD IN MAN Connection of Questions of Origin and Nature. Monistic View of Human Nature (Haeckel). Biblical Doctrine : Man Made in the Image of God. Creation Narrative in Gen. i. Agreement of Bible and Science on Man’s Place in Creation. Man as Link between Natural and Spiritual Worlds. The Second Creation Narrative. Man as ‘ Living Soul.’ Relation of terms : Soul, Spirit, Flesh. Man a Compound Being : Body and Soul. Bearing- on Doctrine of Death. Image of God in Man. Not in Bodily Form. Essentially a Mental and Moral Image. Rationality of Man. Moral Nature and Freedom of Man. Religious Capacity of Man. Sovereignty over the Creatures. Opposition of Modern Theories. Denial of Man’s Distinction in Nature from the Animals. This Distinction Q ualitati've, not simply in Degree. Attack on Man’s Nature of the older Materialism. Change of Standpoint in Monism. The ‘ Parallel Series ’ Theory. Haeckel’s Denial of the Soul, Freedom and Immortality. Theory practi¬ cally Materialistic. Absurdity of Haeckel’s Eternal 4 Substance.’ Stronghold of Monistic Theory : Dependence of Mind on Brain. Fallacies in this : i. 4 Parallel Series ’ untenable. 2. Erroneous to reason from Brain Conditions in Disease to Brain Conditions in Health. 3. Ignoring of Counter-class of Facts: the Influence of Mind on Brain and Body. The Biblical View unharmed, 33-78 III SCRIPTURE AND SCIENCE ON THE ORIGIN OF MAN - THE IMAGE AS A CREATION Biblical View of Man’s Origin. Counter-theory of Monistic Evolu¬ tion (Haeckel). Present-Day Influence of the Doctrine of CONTENTS x; Evolution. Extensions and Ambiguities of the Doctrine. Evolution and Creation. Evolution not necessarily Darwinism. Sketch and Criticism of Darwinian Theory. Fortuity invoked to do the work of Mind. Change of Attitude of Evolutionists. Inadequacy of Natural Selection to explain Evolution. Principal Objections. Revised Evolutionary Theories. Evolution and Involution. Evolution and Teleology ; Directive Intelligence. Evolution not necessarily by Insensible Gradations. Creative Cause involved in Founding of New Kkigdoms. ‘Enigmas’ of Science (Origin of Life, of Consciousness, of Man). Bearing on the Doctrine of the Origin of Man. Failure of Evolution to account for the mental and moral Differentia of Man. Unbridged Gulf between Man and the Lower Animals in a physical respect. The Missing Links yet Undiscovered. Pithecanthropus Erectus . Result: Higher Cause implied in Man’s Origin, . , 81-136 IV SCRIPTURE AND SCIENCE ON THE PRIMITIVE CONDI¬ TION OF MAN - THE IMAGE AS ACTUAL MORAL RESEMBLANCE Evolution in its Bearing on Man’s Mental and Moral Nature. Alleged gradual Development of Man’s Mind from Animal Intelligence (Darwin, Romanes, Fiske). Failure to explain true Rationality in Man. Potentiality of Progress (Language, Educa¬ tion, Science, etc.) in Man. Free-Will and Morality in Man (Haeckel, Fiske, Huxley). Bearing on Origin of Body in Man. Mind and Body necessarily rise together. Creative Cause accord¬ ingly implied in both. Creation of Man ‘ male and female.’ Unity of Race. Question of Man’s Primitive Moral Condition Does Creation in the Divine Image imply actual Moral Resemblance ? Biblical View, and Contradiction of Evolutionary Philosophy. GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN • • Xll Darwinian Picture of Primitive Man. Support sought in Facts of Anthropology, i. Argument from Existing Savage Races $ fallacy of this. 2. Argument from Remote Antiquity of Man. Ussher’s Chronology Untenable. Former Exaggerated Estimates of Man’s Antiquity. Revised Views. Post-Glacial Man. Physical Science on Age of Earth (Kelvin, Tait, etc.). Recent Beginnings of History (Babylonia, Egypt, etc.). Evolution does not establish this View of Man. 1. Evolution is not necessarily by slow Grada¬ tions. 2. Palaeontological Evidence : Cave Men, etc. High Character of Oldest Skulls. 3. High Character of Early Civilisa¬ tion. 4. No Proof that Civilisation has Originated from Bar¬ barism. Subject Viewed in light of true Idea of Man. The Primitive Man of Evolution not simply in a Non-Moral, but in an Immoral and Wrong State. Contradiction of Divine Father¬ hood. Destiny of Man to Divine Sonship and to Immortality. These Ideas Contradictory of Evolutionary Hypothesis, . 1 3 9- 1 9 3 V SCRIPTURE AND SCIENCE ON THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SIN — THE DEFACEMENT OF GOD’s IMAGE \ Defacement of God’s Image Matter of Experience. If Man Created pure, a ‘ Fall ’ is presupposed. Idea of Sin as Apostacy from God underlies all Scripture. Counter-theory that Man has not Fallen but Risen. Objections to this View. On Evolutionary Theory Sin loses its e Catastrophic ’ Character. Alleged necessity of Sin (Fiske, Sabatier, etc.). Evolutionary theory robs Sin of its Gravity. Effect on Idea of Guilt. Insufficient to speak of Realisa- i tion of Moral Ideal. Moral Law demands an Upright Nature and Pure Affections from the first. Biblical Doctrine of Sin : that / CONTENTS • • • Xlll which absolutely Ought not to be. Contrast of Religious and Philosophical Ethics. Sin as violation of Duty to God. Religion recognises Duties to God as well as to Man. Inmost Principle of Sin : Self-Will, Egoism. Sins graded on this Principle. Narra¬ tive of Fall. Connection with Superhuman Evil. Effects of Sin. i. The Spiritual consequence of Sin in Depravation. Bond cut with God. Ascendency of Lower Impulses. Sin as Anarchy and Bondage. 2. The Racial Consequences of Sin. Organic Constitu¬ tion of Race. Relation to Doctrine of Heredity. 4 Ape and Tiger’ Theory of Original Sin. Objection to Doctrine from Non-transmissibility of Acquired Characters (Weismann). Effects of Ethical Volition on Mind and Body are transmissible. Roman Catholic and Protestant Views of the Hereditary Effects of the Fall. Meaning of 4 Total Depravity,’ . . . . 197-24.6 VI THE BIBLICAL DOCTRINE OF MAN AND SIN IN ITS RELATION TO THE CHRISTIAN REDEMPTION - RE¬ STORATION AND PERFECTING OF THE DIVINE IMAGE Still to be considered, 3. the Physical Consequence of Sin in Suffer¬ ing and Death. Alleged Universality and Necessity of Death in the Organic World (Man included). Biblical View connected: (1) With its View of Man’s Nature. Soul and Body not intended to be Separated. (2) With its View of Man’s Primitive Condi¬ tion. One of Moral Uprightness. Weismann’s theory that Death is not a Necessity of Organisms. 4 Immortality of the Protozoa.’ Remarkable longevity in Animal World. Man’s case stands on separate footing. He founds a New Kingdom j is XIV GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN destined for Immortality. Death a Contradiction of the true Idea of Humanity. Posse non mori and non posse mori. Harmony of previous Discussions with the Scripture Doctrine of Redemp¬ tion. The Doctrines of Man and Sin implied: i. In the Pre- suppositions of Redemption, (i) The infinite Value of the Soul. (2) Man’s Capacity for Divine Sonship. (3) Man’s Need of Redemption as a Sinner. 2. In the End of Redemption. The Restoration and Perfecting of the Divine Image. 3. In the Means and Method of Redemption. (1) In the Doctrine of Incarnation. The Divine Image the Ground of the Possibility of Incarnation. Christ the Perfect Realisation of the Divine Image in Man. (2) In the Doctrine of Atonement. Guilt the presupposition of Atonement. The Racial Aspect of Sin has its Counterpart in Redemption. The First and the Second Adams. The Penal Character of Death implied in Christ’s Death for our Sins. (3) In the Doctrines of Regeneration and Renewal. Conformity to Christ’s Image. (4) In the Doctrine of Resurrection and the Christian Hope of Immortality. Christ’s Resurrection and ours. The Immortality of the Gospel, one in which the Body shares; an Immortality of the whole Person. Conclusion, . . 249-283 j | GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN NOTES TO LECTURES i i I. Modern Naturalistic View of the World, . II. The Creation Narrative and Science, III. Monistic Metaphysics — Reaction from Haeckel, IV. R. Otto on Present-Day Darwinism, . V. Recent Views on the Descent of Man, VI. Modern Theories of Evolution and the Fall, VII. Retrogression among Savages, . VIII. Professor Boyd Dawkins on Tertiary Man, IX. The End of the Ice Age, . X. The ‘New Race’ in Egypt, XI. Otto on the Sudden Origin of Man, . XII. The Lansing Skeleton, . XIII. Weismann’s Theory of Heredity, XIV. Heredity and Responsibility. . , PAGE 287 288 289 293 296 298 301 304 305 306 308 309 311 315 i The Conflict of Biblical and Modern Views of Man and Sin — The Issues stated [ A Aversion to Doctrines of the Gospel founded on altered views of their Presuppositions. The Biblical Views of God, Man, and Sin, met by a Counter-theory of the World and Man. Scientific Monism (Haeckel, etc.). Change on Doctrine of God. On Doctrines of Man and Sin. Effect on Christianity. Lectures to discuss Relations of Doctrines of Man and Sin to Modern Anthropological Theories. Extent of the Antagonism. Evolu¬ tionary View of the Origin of Man (Haeckel, Fiske). Conflict with Biblical Doctrine in respect: i. of the Nature of Man 5 2. of the Original Integrity of Man j 3. of the Origin, Nature, and Effects of Sin. Idealistic Evolutionism. Incompatibility with Christian View. Reply that while Ecclesiastical ‘ Dogmas ’ fall, the real Essence of Christianity is untouched. Fallacy of this: 1. Not Ecclesiastical Christianity alone, but the Chris¬ tianity of the New Testament (Apostolic Gospel) falls ; 2. Christ’s own Teaching is subverted. Essence of Apostolic Christianity in Consciousness of Redemption through Jesus Christ. The Infinite Value of the Soul in Christianity. Humanity as receptive of the Divine in Christianity. The Cross and Human Sin. The opposing Views Irreconcilable. I THE CONFLICT OF BIBLICAL AND MODERN VIEWS ON MAN AND SIN— THE ISSUES STATED T N studying the causes of the aversion undeni¬ ably felt in these times by many serious and thoughtful persons to the peculiar doctrines of the Christian religion, we are early led to the dis¬ covery that the real rock of offence lies, less in the doctrines themselves, than in what we may call the presuppositions of the doctrines — in certain views of God, man, and sin, which underlie them, and against which the modern mind is supposed to be in protest. Aversion to the doctrines of the Gospel, indeed — to its teachings on the ruin of man through sin, on redemption by the aton¬ ing death of Christ, and on regeneration by the Holy Spirit — is not special to any one age, and has often other than intellectual causes. No careful student, however, can be unobservant of the fact that Christianity is met to-day, not by 4 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN piecemeal attacks upon its doctrines, or objections springing simply from moral dislike, but by a positively-conceived counter-view of the world, claiming to rest on scientific grounds, ably con¬ structed and defended, yet in its fundamental ideas striking at the roots of the Christian system. The popularity of this counter-view of the universe — frequently described as the 4 modern ’ view — is not to be denied. It commands wide acceptance ; multitudes are attracted by its plausibility, and by the seeming cogency of its scientific proofs ; many would deem it presumptuous, and a mark of ignorance, to call in question a view believed to have behind it so large a body of expert opinion ; while perhaps a still greater number, with little first-hand knowledge, are powerfully influenced by the extent to which its theories and watch¬ words are, as the phrase is, ‘ in the air.’ 1 In truth, however, this modern view of the world, as expounded by its best-known repre¬ sentatives, does a great deal more than simply destroy belief in the doctrines we have been wont to call Christian. Carried through with unflinching consistency, it is as fatal to the primary 1 See Note I. on Modern Naturalistic View of the World. MAN AND SIN 5 truths on which all religion rests as it is to the distinctive affirmations of the Christian Gospel. It is not without justification in the premises of his system that Haeckel, a foremost champion of the modern monistic view, speaks in his work on The Riddle of the Universe 1 of the ideas of God, freedom, and immortality, as ‘ the three great buttresses of superstition,’ which it is the business of science to destroy. Still more significant, per¬ haps, of the currency which these theories have obtained, and of the influence they exert, is the fact that a writer like Mr. W. H. Mallock, in a work recently published, entitled Religion as a Credible Doctrine : a Study of the Fundamental Difficulty , should, while professing to defend the ideas of religion against Haeckel and others of his way of thinking, yet make abject and absolute surrender to Haeckel in nearly every one of his contentions. This capable writer spends six- sevenths of his book in showing, and all the skill of his resourceful intellect in establishing, that science, as Haeckel declares, demolishes the three great fundamental ideas of religion — God, free- 1 More exactly, "The Riddles ( Rathsel ) of the Universe. We quote from the English translation of M‘Cabe (popular edition). 6 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN dom, immortality ; leaves no place for them ; that, as he puts it, there is an 4 utter impossibility of intellectually reconciling religion with the essential doctrines of science.’1 Then, in two closing chapters, he argues that we must still hold fast by these ideas on the ground of our moral convictions and of their practical value for life ! The persons I have immediately in view in these lectures, however, do not, as a rule, go nearly so far as this. They are, on the contrary, neither hostile to Christianity as such, nor wish in prin¬ ciple to break with it ; are concerned rather to find some way of preserving and vindicating the essentials of Christian faith. But they are at the same time profoundly influenced by modern con¬ ceptions, and are persuaded that, if Christianity is to survive, it must undergo an entire transforma¬ tion and re-interpretation in harmony with modern theories, and must part with many of the doctrines hitherto regarded as distinctive of it. The only question left for them to consider is what form this re-interpretation is to take, and how much of the old creed must be thrown over, in order to effect the desired reconciliation. 1 Pp. xiv. 270 j cf. pp. 217, 242, etc. MAN AND SIN 7 I have hinted that the doctrines chiefly affected by the new cosmical conceptions are those of God, man, and sin ; and it is obvious of itself that anything which seriously affects these important doctrines must vitally alter the complexion of our whole theory of Christianity. At the basis of all sound thinking in theology lies of necessity a right doctrine of God. The Christian system is an organism, every part of which is sensitive to change in any other ; 1 but nowhere is change more determinative in its effects than here. As a man thinks God to be, so will his theology be. It is not too much to say that every crucial ques¬ tion in theology, almost, is already settled in principle in any thorough-going discussion of the divine attributes. God, in the Christian concep¬ tion, is regarded as a personal, ethical, and self- revealing Being, infinite and eternal in all His perfections. He is thought of as subsisting in a threefold eternal distinction of Father, Son, and Spirit. He is righteous, holy, and loving. Any view, therefore, which, as in modern monistic and pantheistic systems, negates God’s personality and consciousness ; which, by limiting His attributes, 1 Cf. below, p. 260. 8 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN denies to Him perfect wisdom and power ; which, disrobing Him of holiness and righteousness, denies His moral government of the world and His judicial dealing with sin ; which wholly merges either the judicial aspect of His character in the Fatherly, or the Fatherly in the judicial ; which, going deeper, denies or tampers with the reality of the distinction of good and evil, and the ground of the good in God’s essential nature ; which, confining revelation to nature, refuses to acknowledge any j^pmiatural entrance of God in word or deed into history — such false or defective views of God react at once on any conception we can form of Christianity, and either compel its rejection altogether, or necessitate its trans¬ formation into something altogether different from the image we have of it in the New Testa¬ ment. If, however, our doctrine of God has this determinative effect on our general view of Christianity, it must now be said that the same is hardly less true of the doctrines of man and sin. These three doctrines of God, man, and sin, are indeed related, and in a manner mutually de¬ pendent. Our doctrine of God will manifestly MAN AND SIN 9 in large measure determine our doctrine of man ; while the Biblical view of God as holy Lawgiver and Judge is the necessary presupposition of any just conception of sin. On the other hand, the view we are led to form of man in his nature and origin inevitably reacts on our conceptions both of God and of sin, and through these, as well as more directly, affects our total view of Chris¬ tianity. Suppose, e.g.y we agree with Haeckel and his following in denying to man the posses¬ sion of a soul capable of bearing God’s image, and of surviving death, or in denying to him moral freedom and the possibility of self-deter¬ mining moral life : it is evident that we have destroyed at once the foundations of all religion, save as a baseless superstition, and have struck fatally at Christianity as the religion which most exalts man in his nature and destiny. The result is not very different if we deny to man the possession of a nature different in kind from that of the animals beneath him — say, e.g ., with Mr. Mallock, and with the greater number of the evolutionists, that c the mental differences between man and the other animals are differences of degree only : it is impossible to show that they IO GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN are differences of kind.’1 For, on this hypo¬ thesis, to mention no other point at present, the dividing-line between impersonal and per¬ sonal, mortal and immortal, vanishes. We are supposed to glide by insensible gradations from one into the other. But we have only to fix our thoughts on such a conception as immortality, to see that, in its very nature, immortality is not a thing of gradations into which a being can glide by development.2 It must be there, or it must be absent, and there is infinity between the two conditions. Still more obvious are the bearings of the views which we adopt of the nature and origin of man on the doctrine of sin. The consequences here are such as it is impossible to veil or minimise. If man be conceived of, as he is in modern anthropological theories, as ascending by slow gradations from the stage of the brute — if his original condition is not one of purity and har¬ mony, but of the foulness and ferocity attendant on emergence from the state of animalism — it is plain, and will be more fully established as we proceed,3 that our whole conceptions of the nature 1 Mallock, p. vii. 2 See below, p. 192. 3 Lecture V. MAN AND SIN ii of sin, and of the degree of blame attaching to man in his existing moral condition, must be recast. It is at least my profound conviction that, on the basis of current anthropological theories, we can never have anything but defec¬ tive and inadequate views of sin. This, again, vitally affects our conception of the Gospel, for it is a truism that, with defective and inadequate views of sin, there can never be an adequate doctrine of redemption. It is, in fact, precisely because so many superficial views of sin are abroad, that there is at the present time so general a recoil from the Biblical declarations on the need and reality of atonement. Not merely from par¬ ticular modes of stating or explaining the atone¬ ment, but from the idea of atonement for sin altogether.1 These considerations will explain why, in the present course of lectures, I have chosen as my subject the Biblical doctrines of man and sin in their relations to modern anthropological theories. I have named the subject in the title ‘ God’s 1 It may be noted that, with the tendency to a break-up of naturalistic theories, and the revival of a more spiritual interpreta¬ tion of the universe, there is being manifested an increasing dis¬ position again to do justice to this central Christian doctrine. 12 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN Image in Man and its Defacement,’ in order to bring into prominence the two ideas which will dominate my treatment : first, that man, as he came from the hands of God, visibly bore his Creator’s image ; and second, that sin is the eflfacement of that image of God in man — never wholly indeed, but to a degree that means for man moral and spiritual ruin, and necessitates a supernatural remedy if the Maker’s image is to be restored. It is implied in what has been said that against these doctrines of Scripture and pre¬ suppositions of the Gospel, as I take them to be, much of what is called modern thought is in revolt. It does more than deny, as we shall see ; it flouts them with scorn. It substitutes for them other doctrines incompatible with the Bib¬ lical, and claims to rest these on irrefragable grounds of science. The method of eclecticism which many adopt in trying to combine the one set of beliefs with the other, or by some ingenuity of re-interpretation to bring them into harmony, is, in my opinion, wholly unsuccessful. We have as the result a theology of patchwork — an un¬ natural compound of Christian ideas with thoughts borrowed from half a dozen alien philosophies — a MAN AND SIN 13 new-fangled scheme sprinkled over with words taken over from evolutionary science, but sadly lacking in the ideas which are central in the theo- logy of the Apostles. The cross, in short, that is attempted between these opposing conceptions is, I am convinced, an impossible one. Better that we face squarely the alternative presented to us, and make our choice. It will be my business to discuss frankly in these lectures the problems that arise from comparison of the modern with what I consider to be the genuinely Christian view, and to endeavour to show that the Christian solutions are, even at the present hour, the most rational and satisfying — the truest to fact and to experience. It will now be my duty, in the remainder of this lecture, to expand the remarks already made, and to seek to place in as strong a light as I can the nature of the antagonism which I conceive to exist between the Christian and the so-called modern views. This will prepare the way for the special discussions of the succeeding lectures. If, then, following the guidance of the modern 14 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN spirit, we put ourselves in the standpoint of dominant anthropological theories, we find our¬ selves at a stroke far removed from the doctrines we have been accustomed to call Biblical. The story of Eden, the picture of man coming upright and pure from his Maker’s hand, and afterwards, by his wilful disobedience, falling from his first estate, and dragging down his posterity with him into spiritual ruin and death — this, it need hardly be said, is dismissed as baseless legend — the idlest of dreams.1 They float down to us— or are supposed to do so — these fables of the world’s infancy — from Babylonian antiquitv, and, though purified, and made the vehicle of deeper moral teaching, still, in their childish naivete , betray an age that knew nothing of science. Instead, we have the nineteenth-century gospel of evolution to tell us what man actually was, and how he has come to be what he is now. The myth of the fall of man is replaced by the scientific theory of the ascent of man. Man, as we now learn, is the last and highest product of the evolutionary process which has been going on for countless ages, first in the cosmic and inanimate, next in the organic, worlds. 1 See Lecture IV. MAN AND SIN *5 His ancestry, starting from the primitive pro- tozoon, is to be sought for proximately in the forms of animal life nearest to his own, viz., in the anthropoid apes. ‘ Sufficient for us,’ says Haeckel, c as an incontestable historical fact, is the important thesis that man descends immediately from the ape, and secondarily from a long series of lower vertebrates.’ 1 Evolutionary science undertakes by the aid of embryology and palaeon¬ tology to trace man’s lineage through the succes¬ sive forms of animal life, and to show, at the upper end of the scale, how, in both mind and body, he has developed from his original brute condition to his present splendid intellectual and moral pre-eminence. The nature of the process will engage our attention in a succeeding lecture.2 Meanwhile, one glimpse may be taken from a popular book — Mr. Fiske’s Through Nature to God. ‘ All at once,’ says Mr. Fiske, ‘ perhaps somewhere in the upper eocene or lower miocene, it appears that among the primates, a newly- developing family already distinguished for pre¬ hensile capabilities, one genus is beginning to 1 Riddle of the Universe , p. 30 (pop. edit.). See below, p. 82. 2 Lecture III. / 1 6 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN sustain itself more by mental craft and shiftiness than by any physical characteristic. Forthwith does natural selection seize upon any and every advantageous variation in this craft and shiftiness, until this genus of primates, this Homo Alalus [Haeckel’s name is pithecanthropus alalus — c‘ the ape-man without speech ”], or speechless man, as we may call him, becomes pre-eminent for sagacity, as the mammoth is pre-eminent for bulk, or the giraffe for length of neck.’ 1 By and by Homo Alalus invents speech, and his progress is thereby enormously accelerated. His condition, even at this stage, is naturally one on which that of the lowest existing savage represents a great advance. From the instincts and cunning of the animal, however, human reason and conscience are being gradually developed. Moral life in a rudimentary way has begun. The masses continue low and unprogressive ; but by a happy accident of nature, which natural selection favours, some individuals in the crowd present higher qualities, and push a few degrees upwards. Ideas of right and wrong form themselves on the basis of experience ; a moral ideal begins dimly to shape itself. So the 1 Page 94. MAN AND SIN i7 race improves. Through this nisus, this impulse, this propensity to strive upwards, man has the leverage for advance within himself. Given his nature, suitable environment, and natural selection as a beneficent deity to help him at every turn, he is independent of every other aid.1 Already, I think, even on the basis of so meagre a sketch, the contrast must be apparent with the ideas of man we have been accustomed to associate with the Christian religion and its philosophy of salvation. The leading points have already been adverted to, but they will bear a little more elaboration. 1 . The new theories are in conflict, in the most direct fashion, with the Biblical doctrine of the nature of man. Man is not, as the Bible asserts, a being made in the image of God,' and bearing • from the first His rational and moral likeness, but is evolved into what he is through transformation of the ape-image.2 God, in truth, is not recog¬ nised in the process of his production at all. The laws of evolution are competent for their own work, and God is superfluous. In the result no 1 See further on Mr. Fiske’s views below, pp. 142-3, 148-50, etc. 2 Cf. Darwin, quoted by Dr. H„ Stirling, Darnvinianism , p. 157. B i8 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN clear boundary is discernible between man and the animals from whom he sprang : none as respects the body ; none between animal and human intelligence ; none between animal and human morality. Instead, as we have seen, there is throughout the gradual shading of animal into man. No wonder that on such a basis Haeckel denies immortality to man. For, apart from the intrusion of a supernatural cause, which would disrupt the whole system, there is no point at which immortality can come in. This first aspect of the conflict between the Biblical and the so- called modern views of man will be discussed in the second and third lectures. 2. There is a not less direct negation by the modern theory of the Biblical view of an original state of integrity of man. For this, it has already been shown, there is no room left whatever on the new anthropological hypothesis. Man’s history is that of an ascent — an ascent through inherent powers — not of a Ascent. Man begins at the foot of the intellectual and moral scale, gradually emerging from the ape condition, and slowly working his way upwards. The idea embodied in the Bible and the creeds of a pure MAN AND SIN *9 beginning of the race — of the introduction of man upon the earth in a condition of moral uprightness, of fitness for the knowledge of, com¬ munion with, and service of, his Maker1 — is dis¬ credited and flouted as beyond the range of rational consideration. The magnitude of the gulf between the old and the new is as little disputed on the one side as on the other. This subject of man’s primi¬ tive condition will occupy us in the fourth lecture. 3. It is equally plain, as I have already tried to emphasise, that there is a fundamental contrariety between the modern hypothesis and the Biblical doctrine of sin , alike in regard to sin’s origin, nature, and effects in humanity. There is, in fact, on the basis of this theory, no proper doctrine of sin possible at all. Sin loses its Biblical character as voluntary transgression of divine law, as something catastrophic in the history of the race, and as entailing guilt, con¬ demnation, death, and spiritual corruption on mankind. And as the view of sin presented in the Bible is weakened and destroyed, so, corre¬ spondingly, the need for redemption through 1 On Mr. Tennant’s view that this is not a part of Biblical doctrine, see below, pp. 157, 198, 300, 219, etc. 20 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN Christ is taken away. How should a redeemer be necessary to relieve man from consequences which flow from his very nature as created, or to secure for him a gain which evolutionary processes infallibly secure for him without supernatural help ? 1 There is, however, it is just to acknowledge, a much higher and more spiritual type of evolu¬ tionary theory than that which I have just sketched. The naturalistic monism of writers like Haeckel, which, it is claimed, is the reign¬ ing one in scientific circles (though even that statement, as we shall find, needs much modifi¬ cation),2 has not the whole field to itself. Ideal¬ istic philosophy — especially that which connects itself with Hegel — has another type of doctrine, which is not naturalistic, but rational. This higher view regards man as in his true nature spiritual. He is not a mere animal, though he arises out of animal conditions. It would be truer on this view to say that evolution in both the inorganic and the organic worlds in nature is the unconscious working of an immanent reason, than that self-conscious reason in man 1 See below, pp. 205-6. 2 See below, p. 71. MAN AND SIN 21 is a product of purely natural factors. We are here admittedly on a higher plane, and one which might seem to present greater possibilities of reconciliation with Christianity. In point of fact, however, it hardly does so. In the hands of most of the apparent advocates of this philo¬ sophical evolutionism, the antagonism with Christian doctrine is nearly as great as before. There is an inner spiritual principle, we are rightly taught, which lifts man in nature above the animals, and renders him capable of rational, self-guided life, of moral ideas and ends, of educa¬ tion, science, and religion. But this image of God in man is regarded as, to begin with, only a potency. The picture given by this theory of man in his first appearance and original condition is not very different from that of the naturalistic school. Man, it is assumed, begins, as before, in lowest savagery, or somewhat below existing savagery, and gradually works his way upwards, through inherent powers of development. There is, as little as in the former case, a fall ; or rather, the fall is held to be the expression of an eternal truth of spirit ; the truth, viz., that man must eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil 22 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN to know truly what either good or evil is. Sin, that is, is a necessary step in the transition from mere naturalness to true manhood, though one that needs again to be transcended. It is evident, I think, that this evolutionary scheme fits in with Christianity nearly as badly as the former. If it does more justice to man’s essential nature, it errs as grievously, and with less excuse, in depicting sin as a necessity of human development, in robbing it of its tragic character, and in rendering superfluous the reconciling work of Christ and renewal by the Spirit. This subject of the relation of the modern doctrine to sin will be discussed in the fifth and sixth lectures. There can be little doubt, then, I think, that whether in its lower or in its higher forms this current evolutionary philosophy means the nega¬ tion of much that is vital to Christianity, at least as it has hitherto been understood among us. It dislocates the entire Christian system ; alters, where it does not overthrow, every doctrine in it. Neither God, nor man, nor sin, nor redemption, can be conceived of as before. With the change of attitude to redemption goes necessarily a change in the estimate of Christ’s Person. The estimate MAN AND SIN 23 we form of Christ’s Person will doubtless largely control the idea we form of His work ; but Ritschl is surely so far right when he affirms that the estimate we form of Christ’s work must mainly control the idea we form of His Person. The complete truth is that the two doctrines must always be held together in congruity ; in their inner and scriptural connection with each other ; and, whenever one is tampered with, the other is certain ere long to suffer also. But in the evolutionary scheme there is, as said earlier, no place for a supernatural redeemer. Great per¬ sonalities no doubt retain their place ; Christ may remain as the crown of the evolutionary move¬ ment, and redemption as aid rendered to the race in its upward march of progress by a great and good character — One in whom the religious prin¬ ciple comes to its highest expression. But even this the more thorough-going monistic form of the philosophy will by no means concede. Spiritual life as a whole falls to ruin at its touch. Thus far I have been looking at the conflict between the Christian and the modern views from the so-called scientific or modern standpoint. It 1 24. GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN may be well, before I close the lecture, that I look at it for a few moments from the side of positive Christianity. The answer that will natu¬ rally be made to most of the considerations I have advanced is that, even granting it to be as I say, it is only the ecclesiastical view of Christianity that falls — the real, the original, the essential Chris¬ tianity remains. It is not, I will be told, a question of parting with Christianity, but a question of re¬ interpreting it, so as to do justice to its real essence, in harmony with modern demands. The things which are stripped off, it will be said — fall in Adam, death as the result of sin, a supernatural incarnation, an atonement, regeneration by the Spirit — are accidents : the substance, a purer Christianity, abides. The modern evolutionary conception, it is taken for granted, must be accepted : the only question is, how is Christi¬ anity to be made to fit into it ? And the pleasing discovery made — or supposed to be made — is that, when dogmatic wrappages are removed, Christianity is in deep and beautiful harmony with the modern conceptions — shines with a new light, and receives a new lease of life, from its association with them. MAN AND SIN *5 It is a pleasing illusion ; and if it were not that I am convinced it is only an illusion, I should not be now speaking to you on these subjects. We do well in this matter to deal with ourselves in all honesty ; and it should, I think, with perfect frankness be acknowledged that, in this endeavour to harmonise Christianity with the new philo¬ sophy, it is not the Christianity of the Church only that falls, but the Christianity of the New Testament, It is, it seems to me, only by a species of self-deception that any one can hide this fact from himself. Neither, in truth, do all thus deceive themselves. It is perfectly common to hear it acknowledged that, if the new premises are accepted, the Christianity of the Apostles — their doctrines of sin, of the Person of Christ, of atonement, of the new birth, of justification — fall to the ground. These doctrines , it is argued, were largely the result of their own thoughts, experiences, and training, coloured by the ideas of their age. But the caveat will probably be made : not the Christianity of Christ — that abides. Here again, however — that we may be quite exact — it is to be remembered that the Chris¬ tianity spoken of is not that of the Christ of the 2 6 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN Gospels as we have them , but the Christianity of a Christ shorn of most of his actual claims and attributes, and reduced to the necessary natural dimensions by a process of critical recasting and expurgation of the records. This residuum may be called Christianity : it is, however, I take leave to say, a Christianity which the world has never historically known ; which, therefore, I may be pardoned for refusing to identify with the Chris¬ tianity for which we have historical attestation — Christianity as embodied in its original and only authoritative documents. If, accordingly, we inquire into the essence of Christianity as it meets us in the writings of the New Testament, I shall not, I think, be challenged for describing it as, on its experimental side, con¬ sisting above all in the joyful consciousness of redemption from sin and reconciliation to God through Jesus Christ, and in the possession of a new life of sonship and holiness through Christ’s Spirit. This undeniably, reduced to its simplest terms, is what Christianity meant for its first preachers and their disciples, and what it has meant historically for the Church ever since. But now mark carefully the essential implications MAN AND SIN 27 of this Apostolic Gospel. Harnack, in his recent Berlin lectures, places the essence of Christianity in the three great ideas of the Kingdom of God and its coming ; of God the Father, and the infinite value of the human soul ; of the higher righteousness, and the commandment of love. There is indeed more than this in Christianity — much more : the idea of redemption in particular is conspicuously absent. But at least it will be admitted that these ideas are in Christianity ; that, in particular, the ideas of God the Father, and of the infinite value of the soul, are there. But see how far this already carries us. It means that man is affiliated to God ; that, in his spiritual nature, he is a being made in the image of God ; that he is capable of knowing, loving, and obey¬ ing God, and is destined for fellowship with God. There may be disputes as to the sense in which we can speak of a universal Fatherhood of God and a natural sonship of man ; but there will be no dispute, at least, about this, that Jesus recog¬ nised in every human soul an infinite value, an essential kinship with God, a capacity for sonship and for eternal life.1 But this implies a view of 1 See below, pp. 190-3. 28 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN man diametrically opposed to the current evolu¬ tionary hypothesis with its insensible gradations from animal to man. It is, however, peculiarly in the light of the Christian doctrine of redemption that the unten¬ ableness of the opposite hypothesis is seen. The Christian man is one who knows himself redeemed, saved, forgiven, renewed, restored to fellowship with God. He believes this to have been accomplished at the infinite cost of the incarna¬ tion, sufferings, and death upon the cross, of the Son of God. But this again implies a transcen¬ dent value attaching to the soul of man, such as only a being made in God’s image could have ; implies a view of sin which invests it with an unspeakably awful and tragic character; implies a view of Christ which means that our nature was receptive of the fulness of the Godhead. Sin is no longer, in the light which this cross of Christ sheds upon it, a necessity in the history of the race, but something unnatural and abnormal, the result of voluntary apostacy from God ; some¬ thing which entails curse and death, and which, because it is absolutely universal — the whole world having gone aside from original righteous- MAN AND SIN 29 ness, and fallen a prey to corruption and mortality — must be traced back to the fountainhead of the race ; that is, to a fall in the beginning of the history of humanity.1 But all this, beyond ques¬ tion, is in deepest contrast with a view in which, as formerly explained, sin is depicted, if not as a metaphysical, at least as a natural necessity ; in which its real heinousness as offence against God is taken away ; 2 where its foundations are not wholly destroyed by the denial of man’s spiritu¬ ality, freedom, and immortality. There seems to me, therefore, no evading of the issue between this new and widely-accepted theory of man’s origin, nature, primitive and existing moral condition, and the Christian faith. The two theories stand opposed to each other in fundamental respects, and, in the experience of those who adopt them, inevitably drift apart. Like oil and water they refuse to blend ; one or other must be parted with. Which of the two it should be, it is the purpose of these lectures to inquire. If the foregoing remarks suggest that any antagonism is to be shown to legitimate 1 See more fully below, pp. 198 ff. Cf. Lect. VI. p. 274. 2 See Lect. V. pp. 208-9. 30 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN scientific inquiry, or well - established results of anthropological research, I can only hope that the further course of the lectures will dispel that fear. My deepest conviction is that of the unity of truth ; and just in proportion to the strength of my persuasion of the truth of God’s revela¬ tion, and of the saving power of Christ’s Gospel, is the firmness of my assurance that nothing that science can make good will ulti¬ mately be found to conflict with the grounds of our Christian certainty. i Scripture and Science on the Nature of Man — The Image of God in Man Connection of Questions of Origin and Nature. Monistic View of Human Nature (Haeckel). Biblical Doctrine : Man made in the Image of God. Creation Narrative in Gen. i. Agreement of Bible and Science on Man’s Place in Creation. Man as Link between Natural and Spiritual Worlds. The Second Creation Narrative. Man as ‘Living Soul.’ Relation of terms: Soul, Spirit, Flesh. Man a Compound Being: Body and Soul. Bearing on Doctrine of Death. Image of God in Man. Not in Bodily Form. Essentially a Mental and Moral Image. Ration¬ ality of Man. Moral Nature and Freedom of Man. Religious Capacity of Man. Sovereignty over the Creatures. Opposition of Modern Theories. Denial of Man’s Distinction in Nature from the Animals. This Distinction Qualitative , not simply in Degree. Attack on Man’s Nature of the older Materialism. Change of Standpoint in Monism. The ‘ Parallel Series ’ Theory. Haeckel’s Denial of the Soul, Freedom and Immor¬ tality. Theory practically Materialistic. Absurdity of Haeckel’s Eternal ‘ Substance.’ Stronghold of Monistic Theory : Depen¬ dence of Mind on Brain. Fallacies in this : i. ‘ Parallel Series ’ untenable. 2. Erroneous to reason from Brain Conditions in Disease to Brain Conditions in Health. 3. Ignoring of Counter¬ class of Facts : the Influence of Mind on Brain and Body. The Biblical View unharmed. 32 II SCRIPTURE AND SCIENCE ON THE NATURE OF MAN-THE IMAGE OF GOD IN MAN HE questions of the origin and of the nature A of man are inseparably connected. Theories of origin, it is soon discovered, control in practice the view taken of man’s essential constitution, and need to be checked and corrected by careful consideration of what man is — this being into whose origin we are inquiring. Conversely, the study of man’s nature is speedily found to be implicated with theories of man’s mental and moral evolution, which drive us back on con¬ siderations of origin. It will be convenient that in the present lecture attention should be mainly given to the Biblical account of man’s nature, or to the doctrine of the image of God in man, and to the opposition manifested to this doctrine from the side of a materialistic monism. The subject c 33 34 GOD'S IMAGE IN MAN of origin in the light of evolutionary theories will occupy us in the next lecture. How keen is the antagonism between the Biblical doctrine of man and the so-called modern view may be seen from a single passage which I shall quote from Haeckel. 4 Our own human nature,’ says this writer, 4 which exalted itself into an image of God in its anthropistic illusion, sinks to the level of a placental mammal, which has no more value for the universe at large than the ant, the fly of a summer’s day, the microscopic infusorium, or the smallest bacillus. Humanity is but a transitory phase of the evolu¬ tion of an eternal substance, a particular pheno¬ menal form of matter and energy, the true proportion of which we soon perceive when we set it on the background of infinite space and eternal time.’1 It is the truth of these allega¬ tions we are to test. We begin with the Biblical doctrine, and in the second part of the lecture will consider the materialistic and monistic negation. The foundations of the Biblical doctrine of 1 Riddle of the Universe , p. 87 5 cf. pp. 5, 6 (pop. edit.). THE NATURE OF MAN 35 man are firmly laid at the very commencement of his history in the accounts given of his creation. In the narrative of creation in the opening chapter of Genesis — the so-called Priestly or Elohistic narrative — we have already that noblest of possible utterances regarding man : c God created man in His own imaged The manner in which this declaration is led up to is hardly less remarkable than the utterance itself. The last stage in the work of creation has been reached, and the Creator is about to produce His masterpiece. But, as if to emphasise the import¬ ance of this event, and prepare us for something new and exceptional, the form of representation changes. Hitherto the simple fiat of omni¬ potence has sufficed — ‘ God said.’ Now the Creator — Elohim — is represented as taking counsel with Himself (for no other is^ men¬ tioned) : ‘ Let us make man in our image, after our likeness 1 and in the next verse, with the employment of the stronger word, ‘created* ( bara ), the execution of this purpose is narrated : ‘ So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him, male and female 1 Gen. i. 26. 36 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN created He them.’ 1 This grand declaration that man is made in the image ( zelem ) of God, after His likeness (demutli) — I follow the best exegetes in assuming that no distinction is intended between the two terms 2 — is, as Haeckel also recognises, determinative of the whole Biblical idea of man. It is the conception, tacit or avowed, which underlies all revelation : is given, eg., in Gen. ix. 6, as the ground of the prohibi¬ tion of the shedding of man’s blood ; is echoed in Psalm viii. ; is reiterated frequently in the New Testament (i Cor. xi. 7 ; Eph. iv. 21 ; Col. iii. 10 ; James iii. 9) : is, in truth, the presupposition of the history of God’s dealings with man from first to last. In basing thus on the Creation narrative in Genesis L, I do not feel that it falls within my province to discuss the questions raised by criticism as to the origin and date of this 1 Ver. 27. Dr. Driver remarks : ‘The creation of man is intro¬ duced with solemnity: it is the result of a special deliberation on the part of God, and man is a special expression of the divine nature’ ( Genesis , in loc.). The plural is best explained as the plural of majesty. There is no allusion to a council of angels : critics note that angels are not introduced in the P narrative. 2 See below, pp. 54, 58. Calvin already ( Inslit . 1. xv. 3) and most Protestants reject the idea of a distinction. THE NATURE OF MAN narrative ; nor is it necessary that I should do so. Enough for my present purpose that the narrative is there, and that the doctrine it en¬ shrines is that which underlies all Scripture ; is, besides, a doctrine which is verifiable and capable of vindication from the nature and history of man. In view, however, of its fundamental character, and the importance of the whole subject, I may offer the following brief remarks regarding it : — i. While it may be in itself a secondary ques¬ tion at what period the narrative received its final literary shape or was incorporated in the book of the law, I am, in agreement with many able scholars, not persuaded of its late date ; am disposed rather, with Delitzsch and others, to look on the account as one of the oldest we have, and as coming down to us from pre-Mosaic times.1 A cosmogony with certain resembling features, resting, no doubt, on old Babylonian tradition, but defaced by polytheism and many absurdities — beginning, indeed, with the genesis 1 On the different views held as to this narrative (Delitzsch, Schrader, Dillmann, Gunkel, Kittel, Oettli, etc.) see my work, The Problem of the Old Testament , pp. 405 ff. 530-1. 38 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN of the gods themselves — is found, I know, on Assyrian tablets. There is, however, to my mind, a supreme improbability in the idea that any writer, living, say, in the Exile, should borrow such an account from his heathen neighbours, and, after purging it from its polytheistic accre¬ tions, should place it in the forefront of his Scriptures. The earlier character of the narrative seems indicated by the references made to it in the Decalogue and in such Psalms as the 8th and 104th.1 2. With reference to the supposed borrowing of the narrative from Babylonian or similar myths, I think the first thing that must strike the im¬ partial reader is not the alleged resemblance to, but rather the entire difference in spirit and structure of the Genesis narrative from, all other legends and cosmogonies which religion and literature present. These are, without exception, polytheistic, mythological, fantastic in character in the highest degree. The Biblical story is the opposite of all this : serious, orderly, monotheistic, rational, the vehicle of the very noblest ideas about God and His world. It has upon it a stamp of 1 Cf. Delitzsch, Genesis , l. pp. 63-66 (E. T.). THE NATURE OF MAN 39 grandeur and individual character which speaks against its being an expurgated edition of the heathen fables from which it is supposed by some to be derived.1 3. With relation to science, while I grant at once that it is not the object of this narrative to teach what we call science, or to anticipate nine¬ teenth-century discoveries, I confess again that what impresses me most about this ancient narra¬ tive is not its alleged disagreements with science, but its sobriety, rationality, and marvellous general congruence with the picture of creation, even as modern science presents it to us. 4. If, finally, we look at the ideas which the inspired record is intended primarily to convey — the ideas, viz., that there is one God, who is the Almighty Creator of the world ; that the world is not a natural and necessary emanation of the divine Being, but originated in a free act of God's will ; that creation was not the result of a single act, but was accomplished in an ascending series of acts, culminating in man, in whom the creative 1 In the work above-named I have argued that the relation of Hebrew to Babylonian tradition is probably one of ‘ cognateness ’ rather than of ‘ derivation. I 4o GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN activity came to rest 1 — I say, if we look at these ideas, it may be claimed for them that there is not one which comes into conflict with science, while, in respect of details, so true is the insight yielded by the Spirit of revelation into -the orderly pro¬ gress of nature, that there is marvellously little one requires to revise even in this primitive picture of creation in order to bring it into harmony with what our own advanced science has to teach us.2 On one point, at least — and that an all- important one — there will, I think, be general acknowledgment that the Biblical account is in complete agreement with science ; that is, in placing man at the summit of creation, as the last and highest of God’s works and the goal of the whole creative movement. Even evolutionary philosophy has no cavil to make here. For in it also man is the last and highest product of nature, the terminal point of organic development. It is not, so far as I know, seriously contended by any one — though some in the past have spoken in 1 Cf. Driver, Genesis , pp. 32, 33. 2 See Haeckel, quoted in Note II. on The Creation Narrative and Science. THE NATURE OF MAN 4i that way — that humanity will evolve into some¬ thing specifically different from, and higher than, the humanity we know. Whatever future de¬ velopment there may be, it seems always assumed that it will be development within humanity. As Mr. Fiske puts it in his through Nature to God : 4 In the long series of organic beings, man is the last ; the cosmic process, having once evolved this masterpiece, could thenceforth do nothing better than perfect him.’ 1 The unity of the human species seems also, in harmony with the Biblical representation, to be a necessary corollary from the doctrine of evolution.2 There is, however, another side to the complete Scripture doctrine of man’s place in creation which requires likewise to be taken into account. While man is linked on the lower side of his being with organic nature, and in a manner, physiologically and otherwise, sums it up in himself, and is the microcosm of it, he not less clearly stands above nature — is in a true sense supramXxvcA — and on this side of his being is linked with a higher spiritual order. Mr. Fiske, in his own way, admits this also ; for it is to the possession of intelligence 1 Page 85. 2 See below, p. 154. 42 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN by man, to the fact that henceforth variations of intelligence are more profitable to him than varia¬ tions of body, that he attributes the cessation with him of further organic development.1 Mr. Fiske’s argument, we shall see after, is more specious than solid ; but it will not at least be doubted that it is in virtue of his powers of mind, including under this his whole spiritual endowment, that man holds the unique position he does in creation. In the words of Herder, man is ‘ the middle link between two systems of creation intimately con¬ nected with each other ’ 2 — on the one hand, the highest of nature’s products, crowning the long ascent from lower to higher forms of organic life ; on the other, the starting-point of a new order of spiritual existence, or kingdom of intelligence. Nature, indeed, as we can now see, would have remained incomplete had not such a being appeared to crown its formations. For, with all its order and beauty, nature, without man, is unconscious of itself ; is incapable of turning its eye back upon itself ; and of contemplating what it has brought forth ; has no proper final cause. Only when man appeared, with faculties capable of 1 As above, pp. 83-85. 2 Ideen, bk. v. 6. THE NATURE OF MAN 43 surveying the scene of his existence, of under¬ standing its processes and laws, and of utilising its vast resources, was the Riddle of the Universe (to use Haeckel’s phrase) solved ; only then was an adequate end — an end for self — found in it.1 Scripture, therefore, represents the truth with perfect accuracy when it speaks of man as the crown of nature, and as made in the image of God. Before considering more precisely what is covered by this last expression it will be proper to look briefly at the second and more anthropo¬ morphic narrative of man’s creation in Genesis ii., which also has its contribution to offer to our subject. This second narrative is sometimes spoken of, but without sufficient reason, as in contradiction with the first. Its standpoint, grouping, and mode of representation are, how¬ ever, different from those of the previous chapter. The interest concentrates now specially in man, who is, as before, the centre and head of creation, brought into being by a special supernatural act of God. The object is to show how man was dealt with by God at his creation ; how he was placed in suitable surroundings, provided with a helpmeet 1 Cf. The Christian View of God and the World , p. 135. 44 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN in woman — £ bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh ’ — made capable of fellowship with God, and of immortal life ; but how, afterwards, listening to the tempter, the newly-created pair disobeyed the divine command imposed on them, and brought death into our world and all our woe. In this narrative the creation of man is thus described : c And the Lord God [Jehovah Elohim] formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (lit. the breath of lives, nishmath hayyim ) and man became a living soul (nephesh hayyaK)! 1 It would be a misreading of this pictorial description of the making of man to take it as meaning literally that Jehovah first moulded the shape of a human body from inanimate dust, then by a subsequent act breathed life into it. For one thing, such a life¬ less shape would not be in any true sense a body — much less a c man.’ A body is not a lump of dead matter, but is a thing of flesh and blood, has its parts and organs, is built up of living tissue. The idea of the passage is fully satisfied by assuming that man’s body — the organic frame — was produced by God, by whatever processes, 1 Verse 7. THE NATURE OF MAN 45 from lower elements, and that through the inspi¬ ration of the Almighty there was imparted to, or awakened within, the newly-created being that higher life which makes man what he truly is — a personal, self-conscious, rational and moral being. As much as in the previous case the narrative implies a distinctive act of God in man’s produc¬ tion ; but it is important to notice in what precisely the assertion of this distinctiveness lies. It does not lie in the simple expression, 4 Man became a living soul,’ for the same words are used in Ch. i. 20, 24, 30, to denote purely animal life. Animal, as well as man, is ‘living soul.’ Neither does it altogether lie in the expression c breath of lives,’ taken by itself ; though it is to be observed that the term here employed for ‘ breath ’ ( rfshamah ) is, with the single exception of Gen. vii. 22, always in the Old Testament confined to man.1 Even in the passage named, when read with the close of the preceding verse : ‘ And every man : all in whose nostrils was the breath of life [lit. the breath of the spirit of lives], of all that was on the dry land died,’ it is not quite clear that it is not man who is specially in 1 Cf. Oehler, Theol. of the O. T., i. p. 21 7. 46 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN view in the interpolated clause.1 The true unique¬ ness in man’s formation, however, is expressed by the act of the divine inbreathing, answering somewhat to the bara of the previous account. This is an act peculiar to the creation of man ; no similar statement is made about the animals. The breath of Jehovah imparts to man the life which is his own, and awakens him to conscious possession of it. The same idea of the origina¬ tion of the spiritual life of man in a divine in¬ breathing appears in other parts of Scripture, eg., in Job xxxii. 8, and xxxiii. 4 ; Isa. xlii. 5. In the first of these passages, for instance, we read : ‘ There is a spirit in man, and the breath ( nishmath ) of the Almighty ( shaddai ) giveth them under¬ standing.’ This second narrative of creation affords the natural transition to another question arising out of the Scripture doctrine of man which at this point demands attention. It follows from all that has been stated, and from the facts of his con¬ stitution, that man is a compound being — related to nature and the lower organic world through his body, and to God and the higher spiritual world 1 Cf. Delitzsch, Genesisy in Loc. THE NATURE OF MAN 47 through his spirit. We are accustomed to express this by saying that man has a body and a soul. This is substantially the Biblical view also ; but the Biblical standpoint is nevertheless different from ours. We emphasise the distinction of the sides of man's nature — the material and the spiritual ; the Bible regards man rather in the unity of his person as made up of these two elements. We shall see this best by looking at the meaning of the term 4 soul ’ ( nephesh , i pvxv) in its relation to the term 4 spirit * ( ruah , 7 rvevixa) with the connected terms 4 flesh 9 ( basar , crdpg) and 4 body ’ (crw/xa, ; the Old Testament has not here a proper equivalent). There have been, and still are, elaborate discussions and different theories as to the relations, in the Biblical usage, of soul and spirit, and of both to flesh ; but it will be sufficient to confine attention to main points. The principal question is as to the relation of soul and spirit, and on this subject opinions run, perhaps, mainly into two groups : — 1 1 The different views may be seen fully expounded and discussed in Laidlaw’s Bible Doctrine of Man , with arts, on f Soul,’ ‘ Spirit,’ ‘ Psychology,’ in Hastings’ Diet, of Bible j in Dickson’s St. Paul's Use of the Terms Flesh and Spirit $ and in the various works on Biblical Theology. See also the author’s Christian View of Godi Lect. iv. 48 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN I. There is the view of those who take c spirit ’ ( ruah ) as the more general term, and regard it as denoting the originating cause or 'principle of life, and c soul ’ ( nephesh ) as the result of the creative inbreathing of spirit, or as c constituted ’ life. Thus, God’s Spirit is the source of life or soul in all living beings, animals and men ; and soul is the constituted life of these beings, the seat of all vital functions, that which makes them individual living beings — in the case of man that which makes him a person. It is perhaps not sufficiently- noticed in this view that the inbreathing of the divine neshamah ( — ruah ) in the creative narrative is something peculiar to man. i Flesh ’ ( basar ), in turn, is the body as animated by the soul ; and the seat of the soul or life in the flesh is peculiarly the blood (cf. Lev. xvii. n). The flesh is there¬ fore in man, at least as he now is, connected with weakness, frailty, perishableness (cf. Gen. vi. 3). Man as flesh stands opposed to God whose Spirit gives him breath.1 1 Thus Wendt in his work, The Ideas of Flesh and Spirit in Biblical Usage (see in Dickson as above), and, in the main, Laidlaw. A sentence or two from the latter may make the point clearer. ‘ Nephesh is the subject or bearer of life. Ruach is the principle of life j so that in all the Old Testament references to the origin of THE NATURE OF MAN 49 2. Another view — that which seems to me more correct — agrees with the former in regard¬ ing £ soul ’ as derived from c spirit ’ — the divine Spirit — and as denoting £ constituted life ’ in the individual ; but differs from it in its mode of con¬ ceiving of the soul itself, and of its relation to spirit in man. On the former theory soul and spirit in man are the same thing under different points of view. Viewed in relation to its origin, the vital, conscious principle in man is spirit ( ruah ) ; it is God’s breath in man making him what he is. Viewed as something constituted and individual, as part of the individual being, it is soul {nephesh).1 On the second view nephesh is the living beings we distinguish Nephesh as life constituted in the creature from Ruach as life bestowed by the Creator. ... A usage which is practically uniform, of putting “spirit” (ruach or neshamaK) for the animating principle, and “ soul ” or “ living soul ” ( 'nephesh hayyah ) for the animated result’ (Bib. Doct. of Man, rev. edit., p. 88). ‘All through Scripture “spirit” denotes life as coming from God ; “ soul ” denotes life as constituted in the man ’ [Diet, of Bible , iv. p. 167). 1 ‘ The purpose of the double phrase, “ soul and spirit,” ’ says Laidlaw, ‘ is, at most, to present the one indivisible thinking and feeling man in two diverse aspects, according as these two terms originally suggest his life viewed from two different points ’ (as above, pp. 91-92; cf. pp. 126-7). ‘The two conceptions,’ says Wendt, ‘denote the same quantity ( Grosse ), but with a different estimate of value, because from different points of angels or demons, which have no bodies, but they are not ‘ souls.’ On the other hand, souls, as having a spiritual origin, and as spiritual in nature, can be properly called ‘ spirits.’ The ‘ spirits in prison’ in i Pet. iii. 19, e.g. , are spirits or souls of men. But spirits that never had bodies could not, similarly, be called ‘ souls.’ If this view of the relation of soul and spirit be accepted, it will be felt that it precludes the idea, which some 1 Cf. Oehler, 'Theol. of O. T., i. pp. 218-193 Christian View of God, pp. 137-38. 52 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN have entertained* that the Bible sanctions a doctrine of ‘ trichotomy,’ or of three separable parts of man’s nature : body, soul, and spirit. Spirit, we have just seen, is not something dis¬ tinct from soul as a third separable element, but denotes the higher, self-conscious activities of the soul — to which also, in Biblical speech, special names are given.1 The usage indicated may not be carried through quite uniformly in Scripture — what verbal usage is? — but examination will show, I think, that it is the prevailing one. A ^ The view just explained as to the constitution of man’s nature is, as we shall come to see after¬ wards, of extreme importance in its bearings on general Biblical doctrine. It brings man before us as a personal unity — a being composed of body and soul in a unity not intended to be dissolved. The body is as really a part of man’s personality as the soul is. It is not, as philosophy is apt to teach us, a mere vesture or accident, or, still worse, temporary prison-house, of the soul, but is part of ourselves. Not, indeed, in the sense that the soul cannot survive the body, or subsist in 1 On these cf. Laidlaw, pp. 131 ff., and the various works on Biblical Psychology. THE NATURE OF MAN S3 some fashion without it, but in the sense that man was not created incorporeal spirit. His soul was made and meant to inhabit the body, and was never intended to subsist apart from it. Hence death, in the true Biblical point of view, is not something natural to man, but can only be regarded as something violent, ^natural, the rupture or separation of parts of man’s being that were never meant to be disjoined. The soul, in virtue of its spiritual, personal nature, survives the body ; but, in separation from the body, it is, as many things in Scripture ( iii. p. 25). 108 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN which, as we have seen, scientific men, on general grounds, are not prepared to do ; or (2) to revise our conception of evolution, and seek some other rationale of it than that offered by the theory of natural selection, while allowing to the latter factor whatever subordinate place may rightly belong to it. Adopting this second alternative, we have to ask what view of man and his origin, consistently with the facts of science, a revised evolutionism has to yield us. We have seen that the Darwinian theory is characterised — 1. By the denial of teleology, for which it substitutes natural selection. 2. By the assumption that evolution proceeds by slow and insensible gradations. 3. By the assertion that organic advance has been absolutely continuous from the lowest form to the highest. The newer evolution differs from the old — though the conflict of views really dates from the beginning 1 — in laying stress in the explanation 1 Mivart, Asa Gray, Murphy, Owen, Carpenter, the Duke of Argyll, etc., contended for these views from the first. They are new only as coming into greater prominence and more general acknow¬ ledgment, as the difficulties of the other view become more apparent. THE ORIGIN OF MAN 109 of organic advance mainly on causes internal to the organism, and in recognising that these operate, not blindly, but in definite and pur¬ poseful directions. This change in the point of view from outer to inner, from causes working fortuitously to a principle of inner teleology, has immediate effects on the rest of the theory. It is no longer necessary, e.g ., that variations should be regarded as slight, or progress as slow ; that specific forms should be thought of as produced only by gradual and imperceptible modifications ; that the ascent of life should be viewed as some¬ thing absolutely continuous. These consequences all depend on the fundamental assumption that the effective agency in evolution is the fortuitous action of natural selection. When that is parted with, they lose their logical basis and justification. The causes of variation and progressive develop¬ ment being now placed chiefly within, there is no longer any reason why very considerable varia¬ tions, or even new types, should not appear suddenly, struck out by the Creative Power in the plastic organism. And this is the view which, I shall try to show, scientific facts support. r I IO GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN The new evolutionism, then, so to designate it, in the hands of many of its ablest ad¬ vocates, may be described, in contrast with the other, as characterised by the three following features : — 1. The recognition in the evolutionary process of directive intelligence — of the presence of ‘ idea.’ 2. The denial that the only mode of progress is by insensible gradations. 3. The conception of nature as an ascending series of ‘ kingdoms ’ — the higher in each case involving new factors, and requiring a specific cause to account for it.1 I shall offer a few remarks on these points severally, then seek to show their bearings on the origin of man. 1. On the first of these points — directive intelligence — it is not necessary that I should say much. If the fortuity of Darwinism is rejected, there is but one alternative conception, whatever the precise phrase used to express it 1 I am aware of the difficulty of finding a general expression for theories often so widely varying, but I think I am justified in regard¬ ing the above as fairly typical features, Cf. Otto on the New Evolutionism in Note IV. THE ORIGIN OF MAN in (self-adaptation,1 orthogenesis, or the like) — that the changes through which new organs are developed, and new types formed, have their origin from within, and are directed by the forces that produce them to an end. The pro¬ cess, indeed, is not fatalistic. On one side is the stimulus of environment ; on the other, response to that stimulus, and adaptation to the particular need — with whatever assistance natural selection, use or disuse, or other so-called 4 Lamarckian ? factors can yield. But in and through all pur¬ poseful forces are at work. American students are familiar with this conception through the writings of Le Conte, Asa Gray, Dana ; and it has been, and is advocated by theistic evolu¬ tionists, and others not avowedly theistic, in 1 Cf. Romanes on these views, Darwin and after Darwin , ii. pp. 14. fF., 1 74. 4 Self-adaptation ’ is the phrase of Henslow and others, concerning which Romanes elsewhere says : 4 It simply refers the facts of adaptation immediately to some theory of design, and so brings us back again to Paley, Bell, and Chalmers ’ ( Life and Letters of G. J. Romanes , p. 361). See more fully Henslow’s own work already referred to, Present-Day Rationalism Critically Examined (1904), with its advocacy of 4 directivity 1 (chaps, vii., viii.). We have such statements as these : 4 Paley ’s argument, readapted to evolution, becomes as sound as before, and, indeed, far strengthened, as being strictly in accordance with facts’ (p. 57)5 4 Paley’s well- known argument of the watch only requires readjustment to be as sound as ever’ (p. 94 j on the eye, p. 96), etc. 1 12 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN Britain, and on the Continent.1 Romanes, who had argued against design, would seem to have come round to belief in it, at least on the broad scale, before his death.2 Lord Kelvin, in a recent memorable utterance, re-affirmed his faith in it, and cited the witness of other eminent scientific men ; but in that pronouncement he only echoed his own words of thirty years earlier as President of the British Association. ‘ I feel profoundly convinced/ he then said, c that the argument from design has been greatly too much lost sight of in recent zoological speculations. Overpoweringly 1 Bronn, Darwin’s German translator, separates himselt from Darwin on this point. 2 See 'Thoughts on Religion , pp. 30, 92-94. Somewhat earlier he wrote : ‘ Physical causation cannot be made to supply its own ex¬ planation, and the mere persistence of force, even if it were conceded to account for particular cases of physical sequence, can give no account of the ubiquitous and eternal direction of force in the con¬ struction and maintenance of universal order. ... By no logical artifice can we escape from the conclusion that, so far as we can see, this universal order must be regarded as due to some one integrating principle ; and that this, so far as we can see, is most probably of the nature of mind. At least it must be allowed that we can conceive of it under no other aspect $ and that, if any particular adaptation in organic nature is held to be suggestive of such an agency, the sum- total of all adaptations in the universe must be held to be incompar¬ ably more so’ {Ibid., pp. 71-72). We attach little importance to the distinction Romanes is disposed to draw between design in the ( universal order ’ and design in particular structures (e.g., the eye). The argument above is valid equally for both. THE ORIGIN OF MAN 1 13 strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie around us, and if ever perplexities, whether metaphysical or scientific, turn us away from them for a time, they come back upon us with irresistible force, showing to us through nature the influence of a free-will, and teaching us that all living things depend on one everlasting Creator and Ruler.’ 2. The second point, viz. : the transformation of species by alleged insensible gradations, is one of cardinal importance in the theory of Darwin — one he is never weary of insisting on. Variations, he tells us, are slight, very minute, infinitesmal ; for how else could an organism built up by accumulation of variations have the fineness and continuity of structure it possesses ? But is this really nature’s method of advance ? At least we must say, and Darwin had in the end to acknow¬ ledge,1 not necessarily. A vast amount of evi¬ dence has been collected, and may be seen in the books, showing that very remarkable variations do appear, new forms, new structures, quite 1 ( An unexplained residuum of change, perhaps a large one,’ he says, 1 must be left to the assumed action of those unknown agencies which occasionally induce marked and abrupt deviations of structure in our domestic productions ’ ( Descent of Man , 1. p. 1 54). H GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN 1 14 suddenly, in both animals and plants.1 There has been, accordingly, an increasing disposition to admit, as best in harmony with the facts, that the changes giving rise to new varieties and species may not always have been, as the Dar¬ winian theory postulates, slow and insensible, but may have been at times marked and sudden.2 I may give two illustrations from unexceptionable authorities in support of this statement. Lyell, 1 Cf. Huxley, Lay Sermons, pp. 290 ff. (the Ancona Sheep), p. 326; Mivart, The Genesis of Species ,, ch. iv. (striking examples) ; Lessons from Nature, p. 3395 Argyll, Unity of Nature, pp. 271-73. The most remarkable recent experiments, perhaps, are those of the Dutch botanist, De Vries, who claims to have produced new species from the evening primrose by per saltum mutations. His experi¬ ments have been confirmed by New York botanists. See some account of them in the Princeton fheol. Review, July 1904, pp. 439-40. The writer there points out that the result is produced, ‘ not by the Darwinian hypothesis of accumulating infinitesimal variations, but by the more definite route of considerable mutations ; not by slow development, but apparently by a more or less marked per saltum movement.’ See below, p. 116. 2 The Germans speak of this form of development as sprung- vueise. Professor Macloskie of Princeton University, referring to the experiments of De Vries mentioned in a preceding note, thus speaks of the origin of men in an art. in the Bibliotheca Sacra, April 1903, p. 267 : ‘ Most of the biologists are of opinion, and justly so, that man has somehow been evolved. Most of them probably think that there has been something special in his case, perhaps a sudden or per saltum variation, or a decisive mutation, to use DeVries’s term, which would leave few traces behind, and nothing of the “ missing- link ” kind.’ THE ORIGIN OF MAN 1*5 in his Antiquity of Man, in dealing with the diffi¬ culty of the time involved in the development of man, demurs to the assumption c that the hypothesis of variation and natural selection obliges us to assume that there was an absolutely insensible passage from the highest intelligence of the inferior animals to the improvable reason of man.’ He takes the analogy of ‘ the birth of an individual of transcendent genius,’ and asks ‘ whether the successive steps in advance by which a progressive scheme has been developed may not admit of occasional strides , constituting breaks in an otherwise continuous series of psychical changes.’ He goes on : 4 If, in conformity with the theory of progression, we believe mankind to have risen slowly from a rude and humble start¬ ing-point, such leaps may have successively intro¬ duced not only higher and higher forms and grades of intellect, but at a much remoter period may have cleared at one hound the space which separated the highest stage of the improgressive intelligence of the inferior animals from the first and lowest form of improvable reason of man.’ 1 The other quotation is from Professor Huxley. 1 Antiquity of Man , p. 504. GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN 1 1 6 c Mr. Darwin’s position,’ he wrote in his article on ‘ The Origin of Species,’ ‘ might, we think, have been even stronger than it is if he had not em¬ barrassed himself with the aphorism, Natura non facit saltum , which turns up so often in his pages. We believe, as we have said above, that nature does make jumps now and then, and a recognition of the fact is of no small importance in disposing of many minor objections to the doctrine of transmutation.’ 1 And again, in his review of Kolliker : ‘ We have always thought that Mr. Darwin has unnecessarily hampered himself by adhering so strictly to his favourite u natura non facit saltum .” We greatly suspect that she does make considerable jumps in way of variation now and then, and that these saltations give rise to some of the gaps which appear to exist in the series of known forms.’ 2 Precisely, with the aid of rapid c strides’ and c jumps,’ we can accomplish much; but what then becomes of the theory of continu¬ ous evolution by natural selection of slight aimless variations? Still the c jumps ’ do seem to be there in nature, and cannot be got rid of. The geo- 1 Lay Sermons , p. 326. 2 Ibid., p. 342 (italics in the quotations ours). THE ORIGIN OF MAN 117 logical record, with its unbridged gaps, and marked inrush of new forms at particular eras, alternating with periods of apparent quiescence, has always been a trouble to evolutionists. As G. H. Lewes wrote : c The sudden appearance of new organs, not a trace of which is discernible in the embryo or adult forms of organisms lower in the scale — e.g., the phosphorescent and electric organs — is, like the sudden appearance of new instruments in the social organism, such as the printing-press and the railway, wholly inexplicable on the theory of descent.’ 1 It is not wonderful, therefore, that in recent developments of evolution¬ ary theory, this undeniable fact of sudden change in organisms — carrying with it correlated changes2 — should be deemed of essential importance.3 3. A still more important point is raised, when we come to the consideration of distinct kingdoms in nature. How is the gulf to be bridged over here — the gulf between the inorganic and the 1 Physical Basis of Mind , pp. iio, 117. ‘It is very noteworthy,’ remarks Sir J. W. Dawson, ‘that in the later Tertiary and modern times, with the exception of man himself, and perhaps a very few other species, no new forms of life have been introduced, while many old forms have perished ’ ( Modern Ideas of Evolution , p. 107). 2 Cf. Weismann, The Evol. Theory, i. pp. 79, 80 ff. 3 Cf. Otto, Theol. Rund ., 1904, pp. 60-61, 1 18 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN organic, between the insentient and the conscious, between the animal consciousness, and the moral and spiritual personality of man ? These are the true f riddles of the universe,7 which science in its highest representatives tells us frankly it is unable to solve — some of which it never hopes to solve. Du Bois-Reymond, in a famous lecture at Berlin,1 specified seven such limits to a materialistic ex¬ planation of nature — among them the nature of matter and force, the origin of life, the origin of consciousness, rational thought and the origin of speech. In the forefront, in the development of nature, the origin of life stands as a blank wall in the way of any thorough-going theory of natural¬ istic evolution. Professor Huxley, while acknow¬ ledging that the verdict of science is wholly against a spontaneous origin of life, yet declares that were it given him to look beyond the abyss of geologi¬ cally recorded time to a still more remote period, he would ‘ expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from not-living matter.’ 2 1 In bis Die Sieben Weltrathsel — so great a grief of soul to Haeckel (cf. Riddle , p. 34.). 2 Critiques and Addresses , p. 239. Weismann also, while ad¬ mitting the impossibility of proof, ‘ holds fast ’ to belief in an original ‘ spontaneous generation’ ( ’The Evol. ‘Theory , i., p. 370). THE ORIGIN OF MAN 119 May I remark that, even if he did behold this first inflashing of life into the world, the miracle of its appearance would not be one whit less than before. It would still be something new, not capable of being explained out of purely physical and chemical combinations. Professor Ward, in his Naturalism and Agnosticism, comments on ‘ the light and airy way in which Mr. Spencer glides over this problem ’ — apologising for the omission of the two volumes of his system in which it would fall to be discussed — in contrast with ‘ the confidence of physicists like Lord Kelvin and Helmholtz, or of physiologists like Liebig and Pasteur, that mechanical theories as to the origin and maintenance of life are hopeless.’1 Still, as the same writer observes, the great gap between the inorganic and the organic world is a less severe strain on naturalism than the passage c from the physical aspect of life to the psychical’ ; 2 and that, again, pales before the crowning difficulty of bridg¬ ing the gulf between the animal consciousness and the rational intelligence and free-will of man. 1 Chap. i. p. 262. Cf. the whole section. 2 Ibid., p. 9. Professor Ward forcibly draws attention to the difference between ‘ evolution without guidance and evolution with guidance ’ (p. 205). 120 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN To this last problem, as the goal of our whole discussion, I now confine myself ; and would simply remark, in summing up here, on the altered aspect which evolution presents when transformed to meet these new demands upon it. It seems to me that the representatives of our modern theology, when they speak of ‘ evolution,’ sometimes fail adequately to realise how entirely they have departed from the evolution of a Darwin, or Huxley, or even Spencer, under whose names they shelter themselves. Listen, e.g.y to Professor Sabatier discoursing on the philosophy of religion. ‘ At each step,’ he says, ‘ nature surpasses itself by a mysterious creation that resembles a true miracle in relation to an inferior stage. What, then, shall we conclude from these observations, except that in nature there is a hidden force, an immeasurable “ potential energy,” an ever-open, never-exhausted fount of apparitions, at once magnificent and unexpected.’ 1 True, but plainly, on this hypothesis, the anti¬ thesis between ‘ evolution ’ and ‘ special creation,’ as said before, tends to disappear ; call these ‘ apparitions ’ new species, and what are virtually 1 Phil, of Rel.j E. T., p, 84. THE ORIGIN OF MAN 1 2 I f special creations ’ are taken up into evolution as phases of it. Sabatier draws from his theory the conclusion that miracles do not happen. Dr. Lyman Abbott sees more logically that, on this hypothesis, the door is open for any number of miracles. There is no a priori reason, as he says, why the Power constantly manifesting itself in usual ways should not, if need arises, manifest itself in unusual ways.1 Let us now examine how, as the result of these discussions, the evidence stands on the question of the origin of man. I suppose that, since the publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man , there is no subject on which the modern mind is supposed to have a more entire conviction than on the evolutionary origin of man. So far as this doctrine is a corollary from the general doctrine of evolution, it falls under the remarks already made. The question is not whether homologies, embryology, and other physiological facts, establish a probability of some kind of genetic connection of man with inferior forms of animal life ; on that point science may and must be left to pro- 1 7 ’heol. of an Evolutionist , p. 14 1. 122 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN nounce its own verdict. The vital question is whether that which constitutes the differentia of man — those bodily and mental characters in which he stands above, and is distinguished from, the animals, can be accounted for by unaided evolu¬ tion ; and especially whether they can be accounted for on the Darwinian theory of a gradual trans¬ formation of man from the anthropoid apes, through natural selection acting on slight un¬ guided variations. And on this point no one can say that the voice of science is unanimous. The latter, or strictly Darwinian, theory, though it has still its influential advocates, our previous reasonings compel us to reject. In the light of science itself, we are, I believe, entitled to say with assurance that, however man has originated, he has not originated thus. But it is very im¬ portant here to remember that, if the Darwinian theory of the origin of species by unaided natural selection is abandoned, there falls with it, as already seen, the necessity of supposing advance to have taken place by small, insensible gradations, or of denying the entrance, from point to point, of new and higher — what, from the theological point of view, we would call creative — forces, for THE ORIGIN OF MAN I23 the production of new types of being, or the founding of new kingdoms or orders of existence. So far from the creation narrative being here in conflict with evolution, I think it may be said to furnish the complement and correction which certain theories of evolution need. It does this in three ways : — 1. By the recognition of the element of true creation in nature, or the production of something perfectly new by the direct act of God (expressed by the term bar a *). Even Sabatier, as we saw, speaks of the hidden force, the immeasurable c potential energy,’ the ever-open, never-exhausted fount of apparitions in nature, which at each step 4 surpasses itself by a mysterious creation that resembles a true miracle.’ 2. In laying stress on the production and pro¬ pagation of 4 kinds ’1 2 — of specific forms. For it is a false conception of evolution which represents organic life as in constant process of flux, and 1 This term is used in Gen. i. at the first creation of heaven and earth (ver. i), the first origin of animal life (water creatures and fowl, ver. 2 1 ), the creation of man (ver. 27), and is implied in the description of the origin of vegetation (cf. vers, it, 12 with vers. 20, 21). 2 Gen. i. 11, 12, 21, 24, 25. 124 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN ignores the fixity and persistence of stable types as the goal of the process.1 3. Specially, in affirming the existence of distinct stages or kingdoms in nature, each of which needs a creative act of God for its introduction. These conceptions, it has already been seen, science does not contradict, but in a remarkable way confirms. It, too, is compelled to fall back on the idea of evolution regulated from within, and to dispense with the idea of small and in¬ sensible changes as the instrument of advance. It, too, is compelled to recognise origins, and the appearance, fixation, and persistence of new types.2 Above, all, it is compelled to recognise the rise, not only of new kinds, but of new orders of ex¬ istence — of new kingdoms of nature — of c gulfs,’ as in the transition from the inorganic to the organic, from the insentient to the conscious, which no theory of evolution enables it to pass. I quoted before Du Bois-Reymond’s admission of the seven riddles of the universe ; we have the testimonies of Huxley, Tyndall, Helmholtz, Spencer, and 1 Cf. the views of Reinke, Hamann, etc., in Otto ( ’Theol . Rund., 1903, p. 194 ff.). 2 On persistence see Huxley’s striking Essay in his Lay Sermons , p. 238 ff. THE ORIGIN OF MAN 125 others, that the chasm between the physics of the brain and consciousness is intellectually impassable — ‘unthinkable’;1 we have, finally, the fact of such a thorough-going evolutionist as Dr. A. R. Wallace — in other respects a ‘ pure ’ Darwinian — astonishing his readers by the acknowledgment that c there are at least three stages in the develop¬ ment of the organic world when some new cause or power must necessarily have come into action’: viz., at the introduction of life, at the introduction of sensation and consciousness ; and at the origin of man.2 A similar view, you are aware, is held, as regards at least man’s mental nature, by many evolutionists of repute.3 Our question, therefore, regarding man resolves itself into this : Is man really an appearance of such a kind in nature that higher causes are implied in his origin ? Now, if the answer to this question is to be based on the pure data of science, apart from 1 See references in my Christian View of God , p. 143. So Weismann: ‘How the activity of certain brain-elements can give rise to a thought which cannot be compared with anything material , which is nevertheless able to react upon the material parts of our body, and, as Will, to give rise to movement — that we attempt in vain to understand1 (ft he EojoI. theory , ii. p. 392). 2 Darwinism , pp. 474-5. 3 See below, pp. 141 ff. 126 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN prepossessions derived from particular theories of development, I think candour will compel the acknowledgment that the balance of probability is in favour of man’s exceptional origin. The Darwinian hypothesis of the origin of man by transformation from the apes by slow and insen¬ sible gradations belongs to the region of imagina¬ tion, not to that of scientifically established fact, and even there, it is not too much to say, is being increasingly discredited. There is no need in evolutionism, we have just seen, apart from Darwinian assumption, for supposing such a gradual transformation. Even Lyell, as I showed, allows us, on the psychical side, 4 rapid strides,’ 4 leaps,’ which ‘ may have cleared at one bound the space ’ between highest animal and lowest man ; and Professor Huxley allows us 4 jumps ’ — ‘saltations’ — on the organic side, which 4 give rise to some of the gaps which appear to exist in the series of known forms.’ 1 But the facts speak for themselves. The enormous distance that separates man from the highest of the animals, alike in a bodily and in a mental respect, is not to be gainsaid, nor, to do them justice, do the 1 See above, pp. 115-16. THE ORIGIN OF MAN 127 better class of evolutionists seek to gainsay it. Mr. Fiske, who is satisfied that man, both bodily and mentally, is evolved by natural selection, yet emphasises, in words formerly quoted, the ‘ im¬ measurable ’ gap between the minds of man and ape, and declares that ‘ for psychological man you must erect a distinct kingdom ; nay, you must even dichotomise the universe, putting man on one side, and all things else on the other.’ 1 Similarly Professor Huxley, while insisting on the minute structural and embryological resem¬ blances between man and the apes,2 goes on frankly to recognise an ‘ immeasurable and prac¬ tically infinite divergence of the Human from the Simian Stirps.’ 3 He indicates the essential superiority of man, as being 4 the only con¬ sciously intelligent denizen of this world,’ and 1 See above, p. 60. 2 Man's Place in Nature, p. 67: ‘It is only quite in the later stages of development that the young human being presents marked differences from the young ape ’ — the real point being, however, that then it does exhibit these marked differences. 3 Ibid., p. 103. Yet he thinks ‘some inconspicuous structural difference’ may have been the ‘primary cause’ of this mighty diver¬ gence — a pure chance change, apparently, yet we are asked to believe that all this came out of it. A speck of rust, no doubt, will stop a watch (p. 103), but no number of specks will make the watch, or keep it going. 128 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN declares that £ no one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between civilised man and the brutes ; or is more certain that whether from them or not, he is assuredly not of them.’ 1 Even in regard to physical structure significant admissions are made. Pro¬ fessor Huxley repudiates the view ‘ that the structural differences between man and even the highest apes are small and insignificant ’ ; asserts, on the contrary, ‘ that they are great and signi¬ ficant ; that every bone of a gorilla bears marks by which it might be distinguished from the corresponding bone of a man ; and that, in the present creation, at any rate, no intermediate link bridges over the gap between Homo and the T roglodytes .’ 2 When we examine more minutely into the character of this difference, we gain new evidence of the physical superiority of man. ‘ The differ¬ ences between a gorilla’s skull and a man’s,’ Pro¬ fessor Huxley informs us, care truly immense.’3 ‘It may be doubted whether a human adult brain ever weighed less than 31 or 32 ounces, or that 1 Man's Place in Nature, p. no. 2 Ibid., p. 104. 3 Ibid., p. 76. THE ORIGIN OF MAN 129 the heaviest gorilla brain has exceeded 20 ounces ’ — 4 a difference which is all the more remarkable when we recollect that a full-grown gorilla is probably pretty nearly twice as heavy as a Bosjes man, or as many an European woman.’ 1 Dr. A. R. Wallace, however, puts this more strongly. 4 The average human brain/ he remarks, 4 weighs 48 or 49 ounces, and if we take the average ape brain at only two ounces less than the largest gorilla’s brain, or 1 8 ounces, we shall see better the enormous increase which has taken place in the brain of man since the time when he branched off from the apes’ — assuming that he did so.2 Dr. Calderwood says : 1 Mans Place in Nature , p. 102. The force of this is sought to be broken after by the remark : ‘Remember, if you will, that there is no existing link between Man and the Gorilla, but do not forget that there is no less sharp a line of demarcation, a no less complete absence of any transitional form, between the Gorilla and the Orang, or the Orang and the Gibbon. I say, not less sharp, though it is somewhat narrower.’ But (1) this new absence of transitional forms only creates fresh difficulties for the Darwinian evolutionist (see below), and does nothing to solve that of the difference between man and the ape 5 and (2) the ‘ somewhat ’ surely needs qualification. Gorilla and Orang, Orang and Gibbon, stand in lateral relations, but man on an immensely higher level, and the kind of demarcation, as shown in the consequences, is incalculably different in the two cases. 2 Darwinism , p. 458. It will be seen below (p. 136) that it is now a very debatable question whether man came through the line of the apes at all. I 130 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN 4 The ape’s brain, including the gorilla, with the chimpanzee, at its maximum weight is only 15 ounces, whereas the brain of man at its average weight is 49 ounces.’ 1 if, as a last test, we take cubic capacity of cranium, the largest human skull, we find, contains 114 cubic inches, the smallest 63 ; the largest adult gorilla skull, 34 ; the smallest, 24 ; or, according to Mr. Wallace, the average proportions are: anthropoid apes, 10; savages, 26 ; civilised man, 32. In light of these indubitable facts, we begin to understand what Professor Dana meant when he spoke of 4 an abrupt fall from existing man to the ape level, in which the cubic capacity of the brain is one-half less.’2 The next question which arises is : Has science been able to do any¬ thing to bridge over this gulf, and show how, from the lower forms, the higher have been gradually evolved ? This question also, I take it, must, if we confine ourselves to facts, be answered in the negative. It was shown before3 how hard it is, in the domain of palaeontology, to prove the existence of transitional forms at 1 Evolution, p. 277. 2 Geology, p. 603. 3 See above, p. 106. THE ORIGIN OF MAN J3T any point in the animal kingdom.1 It is stated by zoologists that there are at least five distinct types, or plans, on which members of the animal kingdom are constructed, which cannot be reduced to any general expression or formula.2 Regard¬ ing these, Professor Huxley wrote in his lecture on 4 The Study of Zoology,’ included in his Lay Sermons : 4 So definitely and precisely marked is the structure of each animal that, in the present state of our knowledge, there is not the least evidence to prove that a form, in the slightest degree transitional between any two of the groups Vertebrata , Annulosa , Mollusca , and Ccelen- terata , either exists, or has existed, during that period of the earth’s history which is recorded by the geologist ’ ; 8 and as an up-to-date testi¬ mony by one of highest authority in this depart¬ ment, we have the words of Zittel in 1896, already referred to : c The warmest adherents of the theory must at all events admit that extinct 1 See Professor Huxley above on apes. 2 Others greatly increase the number of these irreducible classes. ‘The zoology of to-day,’ Fleischmann avers, ‘points not merely to four, as Cuvier thought, but to seventeen typical forms ( ' stilarten ), which it is hopeless to attempt to derive from one another’ (in Otto, Theol . Rund.j 1903, p. 10 1). 3 P. 1 14: on a partial later qualification, see above, p. 106. 132 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN links between the different classes and orders of the vegetable and animal kingdoms are forth¬ coming only in a small and ever-diminishing number.’ 1 The difficulty here signalised of discovering transition links is at its maximum in the case of man. The palaeontological evidence I shall con¬ sider in next lecture : meanwhile, it is sufficient to say that the oldest human skulls yet discovered furnish no support to the theory of transforma¬ tion. They fairly equal in capacity the average skulls of the present day.2 The state of the case 1 In An Address delivered before the International Congress of Geologists on ‘ Paleontology and Biogenetic La p- 55- ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SIN 207 responsibility — at least serious responsibility — for it? I do not think much time need be spent over Mr. Fiske’s assumed law of antagonism — a sort of survival of the Zoroastrianism he con¬ demns, with a touch of Hegelian dialectic thrown in. Evil, indeed, can only be known as the nega¬ tion of good ; 1 but it does not follow that good — the positive conception— can only be known through experience of evil. This is precisely the serpent’s doctrine in Eden over again. I do not know how Mr. Fiske would apply his doctrine to God Himself ; but it is reasonably obvious that logic would require him to take up sin into the life of the Absolute — else how could God be good ? — or to deny moral character to Deity altogether. Christian faith, at least, which knows of one absolutely sinless Personality in the history of mankind, will not be readily led away by these a priori sophisms. It is now to be observed, however, that, 'even where the word ‘ necessity ’ is not used, the thing is still there in every evolutionary theory in which sin is viewed as an unavoidable result of man’s nature and environment. I do not say that, in 1 See below, p. 215. I 208 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN some of these theories, there may not still be room for a measure of voluntary departure from such weak and wavering standards of right as man, even in his rudimentary stage, may be sup¬ posed to recognise. Grant everything that can be asked on this score ; allow that from the beginning there stirs in man’s nature the dis¬ tinctively human element, that in some dim way ideas of right and wrong begin to shape them¬ selves, that there are still possible certain ele¬ mentary exercises of choice, which sometimes may be morally better, sometimes morally worse. Still this in no way yields us the Biblical idea of sin. This departure from rudimentary ideas of right in a being still rude and ignorant, wild and lawless in his passions, fierce and cruel in dis¬ position, violent and sensual in his conduct, is so natural, so inevitable, so forced on him by his nature and circumstances — the palliation for even grosser violations of morality is so great — that nothing like serious responsibility can be held to attach to such a being for his ‘ falls ’ ; the idea of guilt is weakened almost to the vanishing point ; while the enormity of the wrong act as sin, i.e., as offence against God, practically disappears, for ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SIN 209 there is hardly any idea of God, or of responsi¬ bility to Him, to produce the sense of sin, not to say to give depth and gravity to it. If it be con¬ sidered that these theories, even the highest of them : (1) leave the greater part of what is ordi¬ narily considered wrongdoing — e.g ., lust, cruelty, bloodshed, cannibalism — outside the category of sin, on the ground that the conscience of primi¬ tive man was not yet sufficiently developed to regard these things as wrong ; (2) attribute to man’s first ideas of right and wrong so feeble and confused a character that disobedience to them is a transgression absolutely venial ; (3) deprive his acts, as just said, of the character of sin, through the absence of serious moral views of God ; (4) preclude the 'possibility of a sinless development of the race — it will be seen, I think, that the accept¬ ance of such views, however earnestly held, must involve a subversion of the Biblical conception, which has for its presuppositions God’s change¬ less holiness in His relations with man, moral law apprehended with sufficient clearness to show man his duty, the possibility of obedience, and sin as voluntary departure from rectitude. It looks plausible, I know, to say that, how- o 210 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN ever low we begin with man — however savage or semi-brutal his primitive condition — there is still some point at which the moral consciousness awakens, and man’s c fall ’ takes place whenever consciously he prefers something which, even by his poor standard, he counts wrong. This is the idea which lies behind most of those modern theories of the ‘ fall ’ to which reference was made in a former lecture.1 But, apart from the objec¬ tion just urged of the attenuation of the ideas of sin and guilt, it is a defect of these theories that they take no account of the fact that it is wrong for a moral being to be in this state of un¬ redeemed brutality at all ; that morality requires not only moral acts , but moral state and disposi¬ tions, right affections, harmony of the will with what is good ; and that of all this the state sup¬ posed is the absolute negation. It does not rid us of this difficulty to talk of the moral ideal as in process of realisation. That ideal is not a 1 See above, p. 158. It will be seen from the above argument that I am not fairly open to the charge of setting aside these theories, or the view of man’s origin on which they depend, in the interest of a ‘ dogma,’ or for the sake of what some may be pleased to call an old scrap of Hebrew literature — the early chapters of Genesis. I base my objections on the far deeper ground that sin is actually sin — one of the surest e value-judgments ’ I know. (Cf. p. 300.) ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SIN 21 1 thing which belongs to man’s perfected condition only, but has its claims upon him from the first, and demands balanced, harmonious, dutiful char¬ acter at every stage of the development.1 May I not add that it is an unwarranted assumption in all these evolutionary theories that the highest type in a series is only to be looked for at its close. It is not clear that it has been so even in nature, \for while on the whole, of course, there has been advance, it is likewise true that, in the different orders, the higher forms — in some cases, witness e.g ., the colossal reptiles of the mesozoic age, the very highest — appear early, to be followed by degradation or extinction.2 It has not been so in philosophy, in literature, in art ; there, as a rule, the master-spirits, the epoch-makers — the Homers, the Platos, the Shakespeares, the Handels, the Kants and Hegels — come first, and give the lead which others Ion go intervallo follow. It has certainly not been so in Christianity. In it the Archetype precedes the development which results from Him and is determined by Him, and which, 1 Cf. Dorner, System of Doctrine , iii. pp. 36-37. 2 ‘ Each new organic form, or each new variety of both, seems always to have been introduced with a wonderful energy of life ’ (Argyll, Unity of Nature , p. 42 5). 212 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN in Church and individual, is yet far from having attained its ‘ perfect measure.’ 1 Why should it not have been so with man ? Who can say that it was not ? In antithesis to these evolutionary conceptions, we have now to look at the Biblical conception of sin, and of its effects on human nature in the defacement of God’s image. Sin, in the Biblical point of view, is, as I have already said, the tragedy of the universe. It is that which abso¬ lutely ought not to be : ‘ not something natural normal, and necessary, but, both as actual and as hereditary, something which must find its explanation in a free act of the creature, annulling the original relation ot the creature to God.’ 2 Sin, therefore, it is first to be observed, is not merely an ethical , but, as Ritschl truly says, is a religious conception.8 It does not denote simply wrong of man against man, but expresses a re¬ lation of the individual and his action to God . It does not regard the wrong act simply as violation or transgression of moral law, but as violation of duty towards God, or offence against 1 Eph. iv. 13. 2 Christian View of God, p. 174. 8 Justification and Reconciliation , pp. 350, 3535 cf. p. 27 (E. T.). ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SIN 213 Him. ‘Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned.’1 Ordinarily we speak of sins against our fellow- men ; in strictness we wrong our fellow-men — we sin against God. It is this reference to God, I think we may say, which chiefly differentiates philosophical ethics — the ethics of the moral philosophy class-room — from the ethics of re¬ ligion , in their respective judgments upon con¬ duct. Moral science, like religion, works with the ideas of law, duty, right, wrong ; but its standard is the law in reason — in conscience ; it does not bring deeds into the light of God’s judgment, or regard them in their turpitude as offences against Him. Religion, on the other hand, views moral law itself as emanating from God, and having its ground in His essential Being ; it brings conduct, and behind conduct the state of the heart, into the light of the divine holiness ; it judges of the quality of the deed by its contrariety to the divine purity, and by its enormity as disobedience to the divine will. We cannot, therefore, speak properly of sin except in the sphere of religion ; and only that religion can yield an adequate idea of sin which, like the Biblical, is based on a right conception God as 1 Ps. li 4. 214 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN the all-holy and all-good.1 There is, however, a second respect, arising from the same cause, in which philosophical ethics and the ethics of re¬ ligion differ. The philosophical treatment, as a rule, takes cognisance of duty only as it relates to man himself and to his fellow-men ; it does not take cognisance of any special class of duties which relate directly to God. Duty falls under the two main heads of duties to ourselves and to our neighbours ; it is completed when we have discharged our obligations in these two directions. But religion goes far beyond this. If we stand in relations to our fellow-men, far more fundament¬ ally do we stand in relation to God, and owe to Him our love, trust, reverence, obedience, with their appropriate manifestations in worship. Nay, our duties to our fellow-men will not be rightly per¬ formed, from the religious point of view, unless where this higher duty to God is fulfilled. To love the Lord our God with all our heart, and soul, and strength, and mind — this, Jesus says, is the first and great commandment ; and the second is like to it, ‘ Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ 2 1 In philosophical ethics, as in Kant, you have autonomy $ in religion, as J. Muller points out, t/zeonomy. 2 Matt. xxii. 36-405 Mark xii. 29-31. ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SIN 215 Sin, therefore, is not simply wrongdoing as between man and man, but, far more radically, consists in a wrong state of heart and will towards God. It is not simply avojiia in the narrower sense, but dcrefie ta — godlessness. This fundamental judgment in regard to the nature of sin is now to be borne in mind in the attempt to discover the true principle of sin — that which underlies, and gives unity to, all its mani¬ festations. The first thing to be distinctly held fast here is, that sin, as that which absolutely ought not to be, subsists only as the negation or contradiction of the good — has no meaning or quality as evil save as the antithesis of the good of which it is the contradiction. What, then, shall we say is the inner principle or essence of the good ? Kant has finely said that there is nothing truly good on earth but a good will,1 and he finds the principle of that good will in unconditional reverence for the moral law. Re¬ ligion, however, goes yet deeper, and, in accord¬ ance with the distinction between philosophical and religious ethics just indicated, finds, with Augustine, the true principle of the good will in 1 Groundwork oj Met. of Ethics , ch. i. 21 6 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN love to God.1 A will destitute of that principle —a neutral, indeterminate will, if such a thing were possible — still more a will enthralled and controlled by passion — would not be a good will in the religious sense. In contrast with this, how are we now to define the principle of the evil will ? Shall we say with Martensen that the essence of sin is the choice of the world instead of God 2 — the loving and serving of the creature more than the Creator ? 8 Or must we not go deeper, and, with Augustine again, say that the real essence of the evil act, when man chooses the world, is not his making the world his end, but the self-will which throws off God’s authority, and arrogates to itself the right to choose its own end, and that another end than God’s ? Here, probing the matter to its core, we seem to get at the real principle of sin. The principle of the good is love to God, subjection of the whole will to God. Sin in its essence is the taking into the will of the principle opposite to this — that not God’s will, but my own will, is to be the ultimate law of my life. 1 On Augustine’s views, cf. my Progress oj Dogma , pp. 145 fF. j and see below, p. 123. 2 Cf. Martensen’s Ethics , i. pp. 96 fF. 3 Cf. Rom. i. 25. ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SIN 217 It is the exaltation of self against God : the. setting up of self-will against God’s will : at bottom Egoism. While sin is the product of this baleful prin¬ ciple, it by no means follows that it discovers its full heinousness, or works out its whole deadly effect, in the first moment of transgression, or for long thereafter.1 Still, it is in the nature of a principle to manifest itself, and, however veiled the real nature of the egoistic principle in sin may be from the subject himself, or in its first mani¬ festations, it is certain, sooner or later, to reveal itself in its true and naked character. This, in truth, is the principle according to which, as we find, we can most naturally grade the manifesta¬ tions of sin in history. (1) Lowest in the scale stand fleshly sins — lust, drunkenness, and the like— which often, through the social element involved, have the power of veiling for a time the naked selfishness of the principle in which they originate. It is, however, a poor disguise at the best ; and closer observation soon dis¬ covers, in the callous heartlessness with which 1 There are many checks to the working out of this principle in the action of conscience, the natural affections, the sense of shame, pru¬ dential considerations, and, at a more developed stage, in human law, education, social custom, public opinion, impressions of religion, etc. 21 8 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN the lustful man throws off his victim, and in the drunkard’s cruel neglect of wife and home, how the Satanic side of fleshly sin leers through all the coverings by which sentiment or joviality may seek to mask its hideousness. (2) Mounting higher, we enter the sphere of spiritual sin — pride, vanity, envy, jealousy, love of power, covetousness, etc. ; and how clearly here is the egoistic principle manifest — exaltation of self, grasping for self, isolation of self, resentment at the rivalry or success of others ! (3) More hateful still — now merging in the diabolical — are those phases of sin in which evil is loved for its own sake — cruelty for cruelty’s sake, wanton delight in the ruin or infliction of suffer¬ ing on others ; undisguised malevolence or malice. (4) The final stage is reached when, throwing off* its last cloak, evil comes boldly out as God- hating, God- denying, God-blaspheming — the stage of blasphemy — as has happened in memor¬ able periods of the world’s history.1 Evil which has reached this height of wilful sinning against 1 On the development and forms of sin, cf. Muller, Doctrine of Sin , i. pp. 147-182; specially on this last stage, see Christlieb, Modern Doubt , pp. 1 38-140. ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SIN 219 light puts the subject of it almost past redemption. It is the prelude to final obduracy : the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost 1 — the sin unto death 2 — for which, when consummated, there is no repentance. Sin, therefore, in its essential nature, is a revolt of the creature will against the Creator — a volun¬ tary departure from the good. This is precisely the idea embodied in the old-world story of the fall in Genesis, where sensuous allurement, and the desire for forbidden knowledge, have behind them the subtle infusion of doubt of God’s Word into the mind — 4 Yea, hath God said.’ 3 It is in the inward defection from God, not in the mere eating of the tree, that sin begins, that the real fall takes place.4 This, however, is not the whole. It is a feature of the story which should not be neglected that temptation comes to the woman from without — from the serpent ; which, whether taken literally or symbolically, represents here 1 Matt. xii. 31. 2 1 John v. 1 6. 3 Gen. iii. i. 4 Mr. Tennant, with Wellhausen, evacuates the story of nearly all moral content, by denying that the knowledge of 1 good and evil ’ gained by eating of the tree was ‘ moral knowledge ... 1 it is, on the contrary, general knowledge, or cleverness, which is here pro¬ hibited, and which man is represented as anxious to possess’ (The Fall and Original Sin, pp. 13, 14). 220 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN a power of evil suggestion other than man’s own thoughts. It is not enough to say that the serpent is simply one of the beasts of the field which the Lord had made : the ‘ subtilty ’ it displays rises above animal conditions into the region of the preternatural.1 The serpent of the story not only talks — of itself a feature con¬ trary to the tenor of the Bible representations, which carefully observe the limits between man and the animals — but it talks evil? which, if nothing more than an animal is intended, con¬ flicts with the idea of a good creation by Jehovah. Those, indeed, who treat the narrative as sym- 1 Dr. Driver says : ‘ It appears soon, however, that it [the serpent] ~ is more than an ordinary animal ; it possesses the faculty of speech, which it exercises with supreme intelligence and skill. . . . The serpent had, moreover, in antiquity, the reputation of wisdom (cf. Matt. x. 1 6), especially in a bad sense; it was insidious, malevolent, “ subtil.” And so it appears here as the representative of the power of temptation ; it puts forth with great artfulness suggestions which, when embraced, and carried into action, give rise to sinful desires and sinful acts. The serpent is not, however, identified in the narrative with the Evil One’ ( Genesis , p. 44). 2 Cf. Oehler, Old Test. Theol. i. p. 250. Mr. Tennant understates the case when he says that in the story ‘ the serpent is regarded as clever rather than evil’ (The Fall and Original Sin , p. 28). Dr. Driver comments on Gen. iii. 4, 5: ‘The serpent now goes on to deny flatly the truth of the [divine] threat, to suggest an unworthy motive for it, and to hold out the hope of a great boon to be secured by disobedience ’ (p. 45). ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SIN 221 bolical — its elements borrowed from Babylonia — are least of all entitled to take the serpent as a simple animal, and few of them, perhaps, do.1 It is, I take it, best interpreted as the personification of an evil principle outside man 2 — if not yet the ‘ Satan ’ or 4 Devil ’ of later Scripture, yet in consonance with that idea, and a stage on the way towards it. It will not be denied that the idea that evil originated on our earth through an Evil One — through contact with a superhuman Evil — is one deeply embedded in the New Testament.3 A catastrophe, then, permitted by God in His 1 Professor W. R. Smith (quoted by Tennant, p. 28) says: ‘ The demoniac character of the serpent in the garden of Eden is unmistakable 5 the serpent is not a mere temporary disguise of Satan,’ etc. Mr. Tennant himself says: ‘He was even more than the ordinary Jinn or demoniac animal. He is acquainted with the real nature and potency of the forbidden tree, and speaks as if he were on terms of intimacy with the divine circle. . . . This certainly seems to point to a more primitive story, in which the serpent was a superhuman being, higher than man,’ etc. (p. 72). 2 The serpent coiling up behind the woman has his place in the Babylonian ‘ temptation-seal,’ which probably, though a good many scholars dispute it, has some relation to this narrative. Probably further discovery will yet throw clearer light upon the picture. 3 John viii. 44 5 xvi. iij 2 Cor. xi. 3 5 1 Tim. ii. 145 Heb. ii. 14 j Rev. xii. 9, etc. 222 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN mysterious Providence for ends on which only the future could throw light, took place in the entrance of sin, the disastrous effects of which reach down through all time. Some of these effects we are now to glance at. I shall briefly speak, with main respect to our leading thought of the defacement of the divine image in man : (i) of the spiritual consequence of sin in the depravation of the individual ; (2) of the racial consequence in hereditary evil ; and (3) of the physical consequence — which is also racial — in disease and death. 1. The real ruin of the soul, spiritually , is only seen when we keep true to our first principle, and regard sin in its religious aspect, i.e.> in its relation to God. So long as only moral law is regarded, it may be difficult to feel that sin is other than a comparatively venial offence — the transgression of some particular precept — which need not involve serious and irremediable injury to him committing it. We cannot but judge differently when we see in sin— what in reality it is — the revolt of the creature-will against the Creator, and the taking of an altogether new principle into the soul — the principle, viz., that ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SIN 223 not God's will, but my own will, is to be my law. Sin means, as above shown, that hence¬ forth my life is not to be, as it ought to be, from God to God— His will my law, His glory my end ; but from self to self — egoistic in prin¬ ciple and aim. The gravity of such an act, rupturing the original bond between the soul and God, is further seen when we reflect that the motive of such an act is necessarily to obtain tor some impulse an unlawful gratification, or, more generally, to give the creature a place in the affections which does not rightfully belong to it.1 It is obvious from this that sin, though spiritual in its origin, is, as I have elsewhere tried to ex¬ plain,2 anything but spiritual in its effects. Its first and immediate effect is to destroy the bal¬ ance or harmony of principles in the soul, to dethrone love to God from its place of supremacy in the soul, and give the lower and sensuous side of the nature an undue and wrongful predomin¬ ance. Not only are these lower principles now in the place of ascendency, but, the spiritual bond being cut which kept them in due relation and 1 Rom. i. 21, 25. 2 Christian View of God, pp. 172-17 3. 224 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN subordination, they are now turbulent, disorderly, warring among themselves, their motions are violent and irregular, sin reveals itself as a prin¬ ciple of anarchy (avo/xia). This is on the man- ward side ; but on the Godward side also there is necessarily a change, owing to the fact that the creature has now become guilty and impure, and has ceased from the relation of dependence. For even in the unfallen state it must be noted — and it was one of the merits of Augustine to emphasise this — man was not an independent, self-acting unit, but stood necessarily in a rela¬ tion of dependence on God, and drew continually his supplies of strength from Him. His life was never intended to be one lived from himself, but was to be a life in God. Sin alters this in destroy¬ ing that relation of dependence, and making it impossible for God to hold communion and friendship with one who has become guilty and impure, while awakening in man the sense of shame and distrust and fear towards God, through this consciousness of guilt. Thus, on the one hand, man falls into bondage to the sensuous and worldly principles for the sake of which he surrendered his allegiance to God ; and, on the ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SIN 225 other, he has lost his love to God, and is deprived of the spiritual aids which his dependence on God and his fellowship with God afforded him. While in the centre of his being he has enthroned a principle which in its essence is God-negating. From these points of view we can readily understand most of the lights in which sin, in its effects on human nature, is presented to us in Scripture, with profoundest echo of the truth of its declarations in human experience. It is truly, as the terms used to describe it teach, a missing of the mark, or turning aside of man from his true end — the glory of God 1 (a/xapria) ; transgression of a law (7rapa/3acris) ; a falling away, or defection ( VapaTTroj/xa ) ; lawlessness (avo/ua). But more particularly — (1) In this inversion of the lower and higher principles of man’s nature — the predominance of the earthly and sensuous, and the enfeeblement and relative inoperativeness of the spiritual— we have the basis of the Pauline description of man as flesh (crdp£). It is not meant that the spiritual nature is altogether suppressed — the vovs is there with its ineffectual protests2 — nor is it meant 1 Rom. iii. 23. 2 Rom. vii. 23, 25. 226 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN that all sins are what we call ‘ fleshly ’ ; but the whole nature has become one in which the natural, the sensuous, the carnal, have attained a sinful predominance, and give a character, a tinge, a bias to — infect with their disturbing influences — every part of the soul. Deepest of all, there is aliena¬ tion of the heart from God, arising from the taking into the heart of a new principle opposed to God — the principle of egoism . The Scripture does not describe the effect of the introduction of this new principle too strongly when it says : ‘ The mind of the flesh is enmity ( egOpa ) against God.’1 Ordinarily this egOpa may be latent; may manifest itself as simple indifference ; but wherever the claims of religion are brought more closely home to it, it speedily appears as open dislike, repugnance, impatience ; as the opposi¬ tion between God’s will and the worldly, sinful way of life becomes manifest, it develops into open hatred. It is thus, accordingly, that the worldly life is described throughout Scripture — as godless . ‘ There is no fear of God before their eyes.’ 2 Nothing is truer to experience. This is 1 Rom. viii. 7. 8 Ps. x. 45 Rom. iii. 185 cf. Eph. ii. 125 iv. 18, etc. ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SIN 227 the root-sin of human life, and only familiarity- can veil from us its awful heinousness ; only thoughtlessness can hide from us the marvel involved in it, that beings made in God’s image, and capable of knowing, loving, and obeying Him, should yet repel, shun, dislike, and flee from Him ; should resent being reminded of Him ; should wish to be without Him. Surely no one who thinks rightly will say that this is natural} There is more than even unnaturalness in it ; there is frightful guilt. (2) In this ascendency of the lower over the higher elements in man’s nature we can under¬ stand the descriptions that are given by Paul,2 and in the Scriptures generally, of the sinful state, as one of enslavement — bondage (SovXeia). The individual, whether he realises it or not, is enslaved, held in thrall, by sin, and is unable to deliver himself out of that state and regain by his own efforts spiritual freedom and power. (3) I would only add that, on the basis of what we have found to be true of man’s aliena- 1 On the ‘ unnaturalness ’ of man’s moral condition, see the striking remarks of the Duke of Argyll in his Unity of Nature , pp. 370 ff. 2 Cf. Rom. vii. 228 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN tion from God, and general spiritual insuscepti¬ bility, those Scriptures are justified which speak of the sinful state as one of spiritual death — of loss, that is, of the true life the soul should possess in God, with subjection to carnal prin¬ ciples, and absence of spiritual interests and aims.1 I do not, however, at present dwell on this. Enough has been said to show in how true a sense we must speak of an obscuration or deface¬ ment of the image of God in man — a loss of that purity and harmony of nature in which he was created, with resultant weakening and de¬ pravation in all his faculties and powers. 2. I come now to the second and still more difficult aspect of the effects of sin in our nature — the racial. If sin is voluntary and individual in its origin, it does not follow that it is only individual in its results. Here open up the large and complicated problems of hereditary evil, or what is ordinarily called Original Sin, to which modern discussions on heredity lend new im¬ portance. It seems hard to deny — though there are those in both ancient and modern times who have dis- 1 Cf. Rom. viii. 6 j Eph. ii. 1-3 j v. 14, etc. ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SIN 229 puted it 1 — that evil has a racial side. It is one of the things which distinguish the human family from other conceivable orders of beings that it is a race , and that therefore any act performed by a progenitor in a representative capacity must have racial consequences. This is the real answer to the objection often raised to the justice of the arrangement which admits of such racial effects accruing from a primal transgression. That ob¬ jection cannot be answered on a merely in¬ dividualistic basis ; what is really impugned is the organic constitution of the race, which we 1 Pelagius taught that Adam’s fall injured no one but himself, and leaves the power of human nature unimpaired for good. Ritschl, in modern times, it is well known, rejected the idea of original sin. Mr. Tennant thinks also that ‘there is no hint ’ in Genesis iii. ‘of Adam’s moral condition being fundamentally altered by his act of disobedience. . . . The idea that his sin was the source of the sinful¬ ness of succeeding generations, or in any way an explanation of it, is altogether absent from the narrative. . . . The history in Genesis iii. was not intended by its ultimate compiler to supply an explana¬ tion of the cause of universal sinfulness ’ (Fhe Fall and Original Sin, pp. 9, io, n ; cf. p. 89). If the narrative is not intended to furnish an explanation of the universal sin and death which is everywhere else assumed, it is difficult to see what it means, or why it stands where it does. Mr. Tennant’s view is not that of most exegetes, nor does it seem quite consistent with some of his other statements. E.g., on pp. 11, 72-73 he seems to see in the narrative an attempt to explain the existence of human ills, and to trace their cause to sin, etc. 230 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN know to be a fact, apart from all moral or theological difficulties arising out of it. As an aid to the removal of these difficulties, I may put the matter thus. There are, so far as we can see, two possible principles, and only two, on which a moral society could be constituted. The one is the principle of strict individualism — each indi¬ vidual created separately, and standing or falling by himself, with strictly individual responsibility.1 Here there can be no talk of racial constitution, or hereditary vitiation of nature. The other is the principle on which our own race, like the whole of organic nature, is constituted. Here there is a race of beings evolved from a single source — generation born from generation — heredi¬ tary transmission of nature and qualities — in¬ timate connection of the members with each other, and a necessary participation of each in the life — in the goods and evils — of the whole, with a consequent share of responsibility for the whole.2 This idea of a corporate unity, or organic constitution, of the race enters deeply into modern scientific thought. On the question 1 Such, we may suppose, is the constitution of the angelic world (Matt. xxii. 30). 2 Cf. Rom. xiv. 7. ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SIN 231 of the justice of such a constitution, considered in itself, there can, I think, be little difference of opinion. It is obvious that an organic constitu¬ tion is one of enormous advantage to the race, provided the race develops normally, in harmony with its true idea and destination. It is in that case the most beneficent of all constitutions ; an instrument adapted, through the operation of inheritance, for conferring the highest possible blessings upon those under it. Equally obvious is it, however, that where sin enters, the effect is as if an engine were reversed ; and all the powers of this mighty constitution, intended to conserve and to hand down good, become as potent to accumulate and hand down evil. So it is that we are compelled to speak of racial as well as of individual effects of sin. If heredity is admitted in this sphere — on which I speak after — a fall from original integrity such as I have already described, with the profound disturbance and perversion in the life of the soul that accom¬ panied and followed it, could not take place with¬ out producing the most powerful effects in the natures of those descending from the first trans¬ gressors. So violent a disturbance as sin creates 232 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN must propagate itself in after generations. If it is the first man — the protoplast of the race, in whom all the potencies of humanity are germin- ally concentrated — who sins, its effects must be serious in the highest degree, and will reveal themselves in a universal defection of the race. The how of this propagation of a vitiated nature may be mysterious to us ; but it is only part of that general mystery of transmission which every doctrine of heredity has to face.1 Here theories of traducianism and creationism maintain their battles, with, as it appears to me, a side of truth in each ; 2 here science brings in its startling sug¬ gestion of the immortality of the reproductive germ, and the absolute continuity of the life of the species.3 But the fact of itself seems un- 1 c How can such hereditary transmission of the characters of the parent take place ? How can a single reproductive cell reproduce the whole body in all its details?’ (Weismann, Essays on Heredity , i. p. 73)- 2 The fact that life is propagated by life, organism by organism, and that the characteristics of the parent, not only the generic, but the particular, are handed down to the offspring, is undeniable (Traducianism) j on the other hand, it is as obvious that in each human soul there is a principle which raises it to the rank of person¬ ality, which is original, distinctive, differentiated from every other, and therefore properly to be attributed to the Creative Source. Cf. Martensen, Dogmatics , pp. 14 1-2. s On this theory of Weismann’s see below, pp. 253 ff. ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SIN 233 deniable that we do by birth inherit a nature which is impure and biassed to evil ; that person¬ ality awakens and evolves itself in a nature already fallen, perverted, and prone to sin — which, therefore, in the judgment alike of God and of the individual’s own conscience, is itself evil.1 The theory of evolution also, it is now to be observed, has its doctrine of original sin— the 4 ape and tiger ’ theory, we may call it, to distin¬ guish it from the Biblical, with which, as a little reflection shows, it is in principle irreconcilable. We have, indeed, on this theory, the inheritance of baser tendencies, but they are simply our natural heritage from our brute ancestors, and have no moral cause in the history of the race, which stamps on them the character of sin. Mr. Fiske, again, may be taken to represent this theory. 4 Thus,’ he says in his book on Man s Destiny , 4 we see what human progress means. It means throwing off the brute-inheritance — gradu¬ ally throwing it off through ages of struggle that are by and by to make struggle needless . . . the ape and tiger in human nature will become 1 Rom. vii. i8, 20, 23. 234 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN extinct. Theology has much to say about original sin. This original sin is neither more nor less than the brute - inheritance which every man carries about with him, and the progress of evolution is an advance towards true salvation.’ 1 No doubt there are elements in human nature that resemble, and only too forcibly recall, the ape and tiger — the wolf, the fox, the serpent also, and many other animals — though it is not sug¬ gested that man has been evolved along the line of the tiger, the wolf, or any of these other creatures ; which are not, therefore, exactly an ‘ inheritance ’ from the latter. It need only here, however, be remarked, that if original sin were simply our 4 brute-inheritance,’ it would in no proper sense be sin at all. The victim of it might groan under it as an all but unendurable cross, but he could never judge of it as the re¬ ligious man does, when he looks down into his heart, and condemns himself for the self-seeking, impure, and God-resisting tendencies he finds in constant operation there.2 * 1 P. 103. 2 Matt. xv. 19. Cf. the Duke of Argyll, Unity of Nature , pp. 367 ff. ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SIN 235 An objection, however, to this doctrine of an inherent sinful bias in our nature, due to a 4 fall,’ comes from the side of the newer school of evolu¬ tion, which deserves more careful consideration. It is well known that disputes on heredity turn mainly at the present moment on the question of the transmissibility of acquired characters. Briefly, the question is : Are acquired characters inherited? Spencer and the older evolutionists said Yes ; , Weismann and an important school of younger biologists say No. Much depends on the answer given to this question for the theory of evolution itself. 4 If these views be correct/ says Weis¬ mann, 4 all our ideas upon the transformation of species require thorough modification, for the whole principle of evolution by means of exercise (use and disuse), as proposed by Lamarck, and accepted in some cases by Darwin, entirely col¬ lapses/ 1 The consequences, however, are hardly less serious for theology, since, if sin is voluntary in origin, as I have contended it must be, its effects on human nature take their place among those 4 acquired * characters to which it is held that the law of heredity does not apply. The 1 Essays , i. p. 69. 236 GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN theory has, in fact, been applied in this way, with great acuteness, to disprove the doctrine of ori¬ ginal sin by Mr. F. R. Tennant, in his recent Hulsean Lectures on The Origin and Propagation of Sin. ‘ The question,’ says this writer, 4 turns entirely on the possibility of the transmission of acquired modifications as distinguished from con¬ genital variations,’ and he declares, ‘ The conviction very largely prevails amongst the authorities that unequivocal instances of such transmission have never yet been supplied.’ € Heredity,’ he thinks, ‘ in the strict sense of inheritance by birth or descent, and not in that of appropriation of environment, cannot take place “ in the region of the spiritual personality.” ’ 1 The speculation is ingenious, though, as regards the question of original sin, experience will, I fear, prove too strong for it. The fact that the sub- 1 Pp. 34, 36, 37. A chief reason which Mr. Tennant gives is that ‘it is almost impossible to conceive the nature of the mechanism whereby a specific effect produced upon any organism could so modify its reproductive organs as to cause a corresponding modifica¬ tion in the offspring’ (p. 37). But is a ‘mechanical’ explanation the right one, and should the fact wait on our ability to conceive such ‘mechanism’? Mr. Tennant moves here too closely in the steps of Weismann, whose mechanical theories will not comport well with other parts of Mr. Tennant’s doctrine. See Note XIII. on Weismann’s Theory of Heredity. ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SIN 237 ject of the transmissibility of acquired modifica¬ tions is so keenly debated by opposing schools of biologists 1 is itself an evidence that the last word has not been spoken regarding it, and suggests the probability that the truth does not lie wholly on either side. This, if I mistake not, is really the state of the case. It seems to me that heredity in these discussions is treated too much en bloc , and that we are not necessarily shut up to the alternative — either all acquired characters are hereditary, or none are. It may be necessary, if admittedly difficult, to make a distinction. What occurs to me is, that there are some changes which go deeper into the nature than others, and produce profounder and more permanent effects on the organism, and that these may be trans¬ missible, while others are not. Physical changes, e.g.y arising from external and accidental causes, as mutilations, go least deeply into the nature, and are ordinarily not inherited.2 We are here, as 1 Weismann himself says in the Preface to his new work : c I only know of two prominent workers of our day who have given thorough-going adherence to my view : Emery in Bologna and J. Arthur Thomson in Aberdeen’ ( The E