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THE THEOLOGY 
 OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 
 
 BY 
 
 LYMAN ABBOTT 
 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 1897 
 
A 3 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY LYMAN ABBOTT 
 
 ALL BIGHTS EESEEVED 
 
• f THE 
 
 IIVER8I" 
 
 OF 
 ■£ALIF0*R£- 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 This book is a companion to two books, 
 similar in character, already published: "The 
 Evolution of Christianity " and " Christianity 
 and Social Problems." Each of these volumes 
 assumes the truth of the principle of evolution 
 as defined by Professor Le Conte, 1 and attempts 
 to apply that principle ; the first volume in tra- 
 cing the history of Christianity as a spiritual 
 force ; the second in exhibiting Christianity as 
 a social development; the present one in a 
 statement of Christianity as a system of doc- 
 trine. They will, I hope, eventually be fol- 
 lowed by a fourth volume, in which the same 
 principle will be applied in an attempt to trace 
 the growth of the Old Testament, and possi- 
 bly by a fifth, similarly tracing the growth of 
 
 1 " A continuous progressive change, according to certain 
 laws, and by means of resident forces." — Evolution and its 
 Relations to Religious Thought. 
 
IV PREFACE 
 
 the New Testament, as a body of literature. 
 Neither of them would be complete without du- 
 plicating some of the ideas contained in the 
 other volumes ; for Christianity as a spiritual 
 force cannot be dissociated from Christianity as 
 a social order, nor either of these from Chris- 
 tianity as a system of thought, embodied in a 
 religious literature. Nevertheless, though they 
 assume the same principle and endeavor to 
 apply it to the same great theme, — the elucida- 
 tion of the Christian religion, — that theme is 
 so large, and includes such different aspects of 
 life and thought, that I believe it may be truly 
 said that no one of these volumes duplicates 
 its companions. 
 
 Each of them has grown out of a previous 
 series of lectures or sermons: the first out of 
 a course of lectures given before the Lowell 
 Institute in Boston ; the second out of a course 
 of lectures given before the Meadville Theo- 
 logical Seminary, and subsequently repeated in 
 a modified form in Plymouth Church; the 
 third out of a series of sermons preached in 
 the latter place. But neither volume is a re- 
 publication of such addresses. Each has been 
 
PREFACE V 
 
 rewritten for permanent publication, though in 
 the rewriting free use has been made of the 
 material employed in the extemporaneous ad- 
 dresses in the pulpit and on the platform. 
 
 I received not long ago a letter from a 
 stranger containing this significant sentence : — 
 
 " Forty years ago, while a student at the University 
 of Munich, one of our professors, Baron Justus von 
 Liebig, told us, a small circle of students taking extra 
 lectures in toxicology, in a pause when an animated 
 controversy about the bottom cause of life sprang 
 up : . . . ' Gentlemen, if the universe and our planet 
 ever came to be governed by a wisdom, science, and 
 penetration on a plan no higher than we mortals are 
 capable of understanding and mastering, then I would 
 most fervently wish to be out of it and in a safer 
 place.' " 
 
 With that sentence I heartily concur. If I 
 could conceive it possible that this universe 
 were governed by a wisdom no greater than I 
 am able to comprehend, I should not be able to 
 believe in a God of infinite wisdom ; for finite 
 wisdom cannot comprehend infinite wisdom. It 
 is, therefore, no part of my desire, still less of 
 my purpose, to furnish in this book a system 
 
VI PREFACE 
 
 of scientific or philosophical knowledge which 
 shall explain the mysteries of the universe. 
 It is no part of the desire of evolutionists to 
 furnish such an explanation. Indeed, it would 
 be difficult to find anywhere a nobler state- 
 ment of the profound mystery of life than is 
 to be found in the writings of Darwin, Hux- 
 ley, and Herbert Spencer. The very word 
 "agnostic," which has been applied by these 
 gentlemen to themselves, and which was, in- 
 deed, first employed by Huxley, is an indica- 
 tion of their frank recognition that the universe 
 cannot be comprehended by finite man. The 
 creed of the evolutionist is all embodied in the 
 statement that life is a growth. But growth is 
 itself a mystery ; and the statement that the 
 universe is full of mysteries is not inconsistent 
 with the statement that the history of the uni- 
 verse is a history of growth. 
 
 This volume is not, then, offered as a com- 
 plete or comprehensive treatment of theological 
 problems. It does not profess to furnish any 
 final solution of the themes of which it treats. 
 It endeavors only to indicate the direction in 
 which modern thought is looking and ought to 
 
PREFACE Vll 
 
 look for the interpretation of spiritual life. It 
 does not profess to add anything to Christian 
 scholarship, but only to indicate how that ma- 
 terial which is the common possession of all 
 Christian scholars is to be correlated and inter- 
 preted. Its sole and simple aim is so to apply 
 the fundamental principle of evolution to the 
 problems of religious life and thought, that 
 the light which that principle has afforded and 
 the inspiration which it has furnished in the 
 realm of natural science may be made available 
 in the spiritual realm to the non-scholastic and 
 non-professional reader. 
 
 LYMAN ABBOTT. 
 
 Brooklyn, N. Y., September, 1897. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. Some Definitions .... 
 II. Creation by Evolution 
 III. The Genesis of Sin .... 
 | IV. The Evolution of Revelation . 
 V. The Place of Christ in Evolution 
 VI. Redemption by Evolution . 
 VII. Evolution and Sacrifice 
 VIII. Evolution and Propitiation 
 IX. Evolution and Miracles . 
 X. Evolution and Miracles (continued) 
 XI. Evolution and Immortality . 
 XII. A Summary of Conclusions 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1 
 
 16 
 
 31 
 
 50 
 
 67 
 
 80 
 
 94 
 
 112 
 
 129 
 
 148 
 
 160 
 
 176 
 
AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 SOME DEFINITIONS 
 
 That the reader and the writer of this volume 
 may understand each other, it is important to 
 begin with some clear definitions. This is the 
 more important because the terms employed are 
 customarily used with widely different meanings. 
 In order to understand the relation of religion, 
 theology, and evolution, we must first understand 
 what we mean by the terms religion, theology, 
 and evolution. 
 
 Religion is the life of God in the soul of man. 
 Belief in the reality of religion involves belief 
 that God is, and that He stands in some per- 
 sonal relation to man. But it is not an opinion 
 respecting God, nor an opinion respecting His 
 influence in the world of men. It is a per- 
 sonal consciousness of God. It is a human ex- 
 perience, but an experience of relationship with 
 One who transcends humanity. The creed is 
 
2 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 not religion ; the creed is a statement of what 
 certain men think about religion. Worship is 
 not religion ; worship is a method of expressing 
 religion. The church is not religion ; the church 
 is an organization of men and women, formed 
 for the purpose of promoting religion. Keligion 
 precedes creeds, worship, church ; that is, the life 
 precedes men's thoughts about the life, men's 
 expression of the life, men's organizations formed 
 to promote the life. Religion may be personal 
 or social ; that is, it may be the consciousness of 
 God in the individual soul, or it may be the con- 
 current consciousness of God in a great number 
 of individuals, producing a social or communal 
 life. In either case it is a life, not an opinion 
 about life. It is not a definition of God, it is 
 fellowship with Him ; not a definition of sin, but 
 sorrow because of sin; not a definition of for- 
 giveness, but relief from remorse ; not a definition 
 of redemption, but a new and divine life. 
 
 Theology is the science of religion. It is the 
 ' result of an attempt made by men to state in an 
 orderly and systematic manner the facts respect- 
 ing the life of God in the soul of man. It in- 
 volves intellectual definition of the various forms 
 of consciousness which constitute the religious 
 life. Its relation to religion is the relation of 
 other sciences to the vital phenomena which they 
 endeavor to explain. With the growth of the 
 
 ** 
 
SOME DEFINITIONS 3 
 
 human intellect there comes a wiser study of life, 
 a better understanding of it, a new definition of 
 its terms, and a new classification of its phenom- 
 ena. The life does not change, but man's under- 
 standing of it changes. There is a new astron- 
 omy, though the stars are old; a new botany, 
 though vegetable life is unchanged ; a new chemis- 
 try, though the constituent elements of the uni- 
 verse are the same. So there is a new theology, 
 though not a new religion. God, sin, repentance, 
 forgiveness, love, remain essentially unchanged, 
 but the definitions of God, sin, repentance, for- 
 giveness, and love are changed from generation 
 to generation. There is as little danger of un- 
 dermining religion by new definitions of theology 
 as there is of blotting out the stars from the 
 heavens by a new astronomy. But as religion is 
 the life of God in the soul of man, definitions 
 which give to man a clearer and a more intelli- 
 gible understanding of that life will promote it, 
 and definitions which are, or seem to be, irra- 
 tional, will tend to impede or impair it. To this 
 extent theology affects the religious life as other 
 sciences do not affect the life with which they 
 have to deal. * 
 
 Evolution is described by John Fiske as %/" 
 " God's way of doing things." Theology also 
 may be described as an attempt to explain God's 
 way of doing things. Thus, to a certain extent 
 
4 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 the science of evolution and the science of theo- 
 logy have the same ultimate end. Both attempt 
 to furnish an orderly, rational, and self -consis- 
 tent account of phenomena. The supposed in- 
 consistency between science and religion is really 
 an inconsistency between two sciences. The the- 
 ologian and the scientist have given different, 
 and to some extent inconsistent, accounts of 
 God's way of doing things. It is important for 
 us to know which account is correct. It is even 
 religiously desirable that we should know, since 
 our understanding of God's influence upon the 
 human soul affects that influence. 
 
 The current theology is Roman in its origin. 
 It assumes as an axiom a God apart from the 
 universe and ruling over it, as the Roman Em- 
 peror was apart from the Roman Empire and 
 ruled over it. It conceives of His government as 
 a series of successive interventions. He creates 
 the world out of nothing in the space of six days, 
 and then rests. Man sins, and lest he should 
 become immortal and so independent of his sin, 
 God intervenes and drives him from the garden. 
 His sin grows greater; God intervenes again, 
 sweeps the human race from the globe, and makes 
 a new beginning. Man has no natural capacity 
 to know God. God compassionately intervenes 
 once more, and makes to man special revelations ; 
 outside the race to which these revelations are 
 
SOME DEFINITIONS 5 
 
 made there is no possibility of the knowledge of 
 God, — that is, no possibility of true religion. 
 To attest this revelation which God has made 
 of Himself, interventions in the laws of nature 
 which He has ordained are necessary. These 
 interventions, called miracles, are essential to 
 revelation, and revelation is essential to the 
 knowledge of God, — that is, to true religion. 
 Thus theology assumes that God's way of doing 
 things in the material world is the way of a 
 mechanic operating upon a machine ; His way 
 of doing things in the spiritual world is the way 
 of a king ruling over an empire. God is some 
 one outside of nature and outside of men, oper- S 
 ating upon nature and upon men. 
 
 This conception of the universe as set in 
 operation by a Great First Cause, but operated 
 continuously by secondary causes, occasionally 
 modified in their action by the original Creator, 
 is one which I formerly entertained, and there is 
 no inherent inconsistency or irrationality in it. 
 It is certainly quite consonant with faith in a liv- 
 ing God, in revelation, in incarnation, in atone- 
 ment, in immortality. But it is rejected to-day 
 by the great mass of scientific thinkers, and by 
 an increasing number of philosophical thinkers. 
 They have seen more and more reason to believe 
 that all forces are one force, and that events 
 formerly attributed to interventions of an appar- 
 
6 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 ently arbitrary will are really due to the opera- 
 tion of this one force. They have seen one sup- 
 posed intervention after another eliminated, and 
 they have come to believe that when the universe 
 is fully understood it will appear that there are 
 no such interventions. We are all agreed that 
 there are fewer than our ancestors thought there 
 were ; the scientist of to-day thinks it probable 
 that there are none. It is not my object to 
 show that the scientist is right, but to show that, 
 if he is right, he may still hold to spiritual faith 
 in God, Bible, Christ, Sacrifice. This volume 
 is addressed not to disbelievers in evolution to 
 prove that they are mistaken, but to believers 
 in evolution to show them that their belief is not 
 inconsistent with the Christian faith; it is in- 
 consistent with much in the old theology, but 
 not with anything in the old faith. 
 
 It is true that I am an evolutionist, and in- 
 clined to be a radical evolutionist. It is per- 
 haps proper to indicate in a paragraph the 
 reasons for my change of opinion, — a change 
 which has taken place gradually and almost un- 
 consciously. 
 
 In the first place, all biologists are evolution- 
 ists, probably without a single exception. They 
 are not all Darwinians, — that is, they do not 
 all regard " struggle for existence and survival 
 of the fittest " as an adequate statement of the 
 
SOME DEFINITIONS 7 
 
 process of evolution. Indeed, it may be said that 
 this is no longer by any one regarded as a com- 
 plete summary of the process, even if it were so 
 regarded by Darwin himself, which is doubtful. 
 I am not an expert biologist; few ministers 
 are. We are not competent to pass any inde- 
 pendent judgment of value on the question, 
 What is the process of life in its earlier forms ? 
 We have not the scientific habit of mind which 
 enables us to sift the evidence and reach a con- 
 clusion. How many of those who read this chap- 
 ter could pass a creditable examination on the 
 question at issue between the Ptolemaic and the 
 Copernican theories of astronomy, or the atomic 
 and undulatory theory of light ? Probably but 
 few. We accept the testimony of the experts 
 when they have reached a conclusion. This is 
 my first reason for being an evolutionist. Prac- 
 tically all scientists, I believe absolutely all 
 biologists, are evolutionists. They have proved 
 themselves careful, painstaking, assiduous stu- 
 dents of life. I assume the correctness of their 
 conclusion. I have studied, it is true, the writ- 
 ings of Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, Tyndall, and 
 the later epitomes of Le Conte, Drummond, and 
 Tyler, and have read the more important of the 
 criticisms on the other side, — enough to see that 
 the hypothesis of evolution has a groundwork 
 of fact and reason. But I accept evolution, as 
 
/ 
 
 8 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 a statement of the process of physical life, not 
 from a personal scientific investigation, which I 
 have not the training to conduct, but upon the 
 substantially unanimous testimony of those who 
 have such training. 
 
 On the other hand, the minister ought to be 
 a special student of the moral life. He ought 
 to know man as a moral actor, literature as the 
 expression of his moral consciousness, history as 
 the record of his moral progress, society as a 
 moral organism. He ought to be able to pass 
 something approximating an expert judgment 
 on the question whether and how far evolution 
 explains " the history of the process " by which 
 the individual man, his literature, his history, 
 his social and political organisms, have come to 
 be what they are. To this subject I have given 
 years of study, sometimes systematic, sometimes 
 desultory, sometimes in theoretical investiga- 
 tions, sometimes in practical applications. The 
 result of this study has been a conclusion, very 
 gradually formed, that the history of that process 
 is best expressed by the word " evolution," — 
 that is, that the process has been one of continu- 
 ous progressive growth, from a lower to a higher, 
 from a simpler to a more complex organization, 
 under the influence of resident forces, and in 
 accordance with law. And this opinion has 
 been confirmed by Bible study. It appears to 
 
SOME DEFINITIONS * 
 
 me to harmonize better with the general spirit of 
 Biblical teaching than does the anti-evolutionary 
 conception of life. These two reasons, the sub- 
 stantially unanimous judgment of experts in a 
 department with which I am not familiar, and 
 my own independent judgment in a department 
 with which I have some familiarity, have led me 
 to accept evolution as a history of the process of S 
 life, or as " God's way of doing things." 
 
 I acknowledge myself, then, a radical evolu- 
 tionist, — it is hardly necessary to say a theistic 
 evolutionist. I reverently and heartily accept 
 the axiom of theology that a personal God is the 
 foundation of all life; but I also believe that 
 God has but one way of doing things ; that His 
 way may be described in one word as the way 
 of growth, or development, or evolution, terms 
 which are substantially synonymous ; that He re- 
 sides in the world of nature and in the world of 
 men ; that there are no laws of nature which are 
 not the laws of God's own being ; that there are 
 no forces of nature, that there is only one divine, 
 infinite force, always proceeding from, always 
 subject to the will of God ; that there are not 
 occasional or exceptional theophanies, but that 
 all nature and all life is one great theophany ; 
 that there are not occasional interventions in 
 the order of life which bear witness to the pre- 
 sence of God, but that life is itself a perpetual 
 
10 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 witness to His presence ; that He transcends all 
 phenomena, and yet is the creative, controlling, 
 directing force in all phenomena. In so far as 
 the theologian and the evolutionist differ in 
 their interpretation of the history of life — that 
 is, upon the question whether God's way of do- 
 ing things is a way of successive interventions 
 or a continuous and unbroken progress — I 
 agree with the evolutionist, not with the theo- 
 logian. My object in this volume is to show 
 that religion — that is, the life of God in the 
 soul of man — is better comprehended, and will 
 better be promoted, by the philosophy which re- 
 gards all life as divine, and God's way of doing 
 things as the way of a continuous, progressive 
 change, according to certain laws and by means 
 of one resident force, than by the philosophy 
 which supposes that some things are done by 
 natural forces and according to natural laws, 
 and others by special interventions of a Divine 
 Will, acting from without, for the purpose of 
 correcting errors or filling gaps. 
 
 The affirmation that all growth is due to " re- 
 sident forces," or a " resident force," requires, 
 perhaps, some additional explanation, for it is 
 to this affirmation that the critics of evolution 
 chiefly object. They generally agree that the 
 interventions from without are fewer than we 
 used to think ; but they still believe that there 
 
SOME DEFINITIONS 11 
 
 must be or have been some interventions : as in 
 the passage from the inorganic to the organic, 
 and again from the vegetable to the animal, 
 and yet again from the animal to the human. 
 "That phrase," says Professor W. Douglass 
 MacKenzie in the " Bibliotheca Sacra," x " * by 
 means of resident forces,' is one to which excep- 
 tion of the most serious kind must be taken. . . . 
 In that definition of evolution no man of sci- 
 ence would understand by the phrase ' by means 
 of resident forces,' this, that God is continually 
 pouring the energies of his Divine will into 
 created forms, and carrying them forward to 
 their further development. Any man of science 
 would understand that definition to mean, that 
 the evolution of any form of life takes place 
 wholly by means of the forces already resident 
 in the forms of existence which had been real- 
 ized in the preceding stages of history." I think 
 that as matter of literary interpretation Dr. Mac- 
 Kenzie is mistaken, and that Professor Le Conte 
 and Professor Drummond, both of them men of 
 science, do clearly understand substantially what 
 Dr. MacKenzie says no man of science would 
 understand by the phrase " resident forces," and 
 that even Professor Tyndall implies that under- 
 standing as a probable opinion, though not as a 
 
 1 Bibliotheca Sacra, July, 1897 : " Evolution and Christian 
 Doctrine." 
 
12 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 positive faith. The theology and the science of 
 the past have agreed in assuming what I think 
 the theology and the science of the future will 
 agree in denying, that God sits apart from 
 nature, and that there are natural forces and 
 natural laws which operate independently of 
 Him. Starting from this assumption, of course 
 theology has resisted bitterly every attempt to 
 lessen the number of interventions in the order 
 of nature, because the inevitable result was to 
 lessen the evidence of a Divine presence in the 
 world. Nevertheless, both the religious and the 
 scientific world have come to believe in a greatly 
 lessened number of interventions, until now sci- 
 ence has reached with practical unanimity these 
 three conclusions : first, there is but one force, 
 manifesting itself in different forms; second, 
 that this force is never increased or diminished 
 in amount, only varied in form ; and third, that 
 this force, if we believe it to be directed to intel- 
 ligent ends, is sufficient to account for all the 
 phenomena of nature and life, so that there is 
 no reason to believe in any interventions from 
 without. I believe that the theology of the 
 future will frankly and gladly accept these con- 
 clusions, instead of resisting them and endeavor- 
 ing to discover some evidences of interventions 
 constantly lessening in number if not in magni- 
 tude. It, too, will affirm that there is only one 
 
SOME DEFINITIONS 13 
 
 force, the " Infinite and Eternal Energy from \\^- 
 which all things proceed.'' It will affirm that 
 this Infinite and Eternal Energy is never in- 
 creased or diminished ; that, in other words, 
 God, who varies infinitely in His manifestations, 
 varies in no whit in His real life. It will affirm 
 that there are and can be no interventions in 
 this resident force, this Infinite and Eternal 
 Energy, for if there were there would be a second 
 God, superior to the God who resides in the uni- 
 verse and controlling Him. And finally, it will 
 affirm that this Infinite and Eternal Energy is 
 itself intelligent and beneficent, — an infinitely 
 wise and holy Spirit, dwelling within the uni- 
 verse and shaping it from within, much as the 
 human spirit dwells within the human body and 
 forms and controls it from within. Scientifically 
 this is the affirmation that the forces of nature 
 are one vital force ; theologically it is the affir- 
 mation that God is an Immanent God. " Re- 
 sident forces" and "Divine Immanence" are 
 different forms of the same statement. Accord- 
 ing to this view, it is not correct to say that 
 " God, the one Force, did somehow bring into 
 being the earliest forms of matter with resident 
 forces." * It is correct to say that from the 
 earliest time we know anything about, God, the 
 one Resident Force, has been shaping matter 
 
 1 Dr. W. D. MacKenzie. Biblioiheca Sacra, July, 1897. 
 
14 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 i , 
 
 into its various forms. It is not correct to say- 
 that " the interactions of the various portions of 
 this primeval matter did, by continuous and 
 progressive changes, result in the production of 
 all later forms of existence, including life and 
 consciousness, reason and conscience." 1 It is 
 correct to say that all later forms of existence, 
 including life and consciousness, reason and 
 conscience, are the manifestations of His power, 
 and the revelations of His presence who is God, 
 " the all in all." 2 Nor is this inconsistent with 
 the belief that the heaven of heavens cannot 
 contain Him. The Divine Spirit which resides 
 in Nature transcends Nature, as the human 
 spirit which resides in the body transcends the 
 body. The Divine Spirit which is manifested 
 in all phenomena is more than the sum of all 
 phenomena, as the human spirit which is mani- 
 fested in all the activities of a life is more than 
 the sum of those activities. The belief that the 
 Divine Spirit resides in the universe is no more 
 pantheism than belief that the human spirit 
 resides in the body is materialism. This faith 
 in the Divine Immanence, in an Intelligent and 
 Beneficent Will working in the so-called forces 
 of Nature, is neither atheistic nor pantheistic. 
 Belief that all energies are vital is not belief 
 
 1 Dr. W. D. MacKenzie. Biblioiheca Sacra, July, 1897. 
 
 2 to irdvTa iv iraffip. 1 Corinthians xv. 28. 
 
SOME DEFINITIONS 15 
 
 that there are no vital energies. Belief that all 
 resident forces are Divine is not belief that 
 there is no true Divinity. 
 
 It seemed necessary to make this explanation 
 to guard, if possible, against the common misap- 
 prehension of the evolutionist's position, as that 
 of one whose faith in " resident forces " implies 
 no faith in God. The theistic evolutionist be- 
 lieves that God is the one Eesident Force, that 
 He is in His world ; that His method of work in 
 His world is the method of growth ; and that 
 the history of the world, whether it be the his- 
 tory of creation, of providence, or of redemp- 
 tion, whether the history of redemption in the 
 race or of redemption in the individual soul, is 
 the history of a growth in accordance with the 
 great law interpreted and uttered in that one 
 word evolution. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 CREATION BY EVOLUTION 
 
 When man would make a rose with tools, 
 he fashions petals and leaves of wax, colors 
 them, manufactures a stalk by the same mechan- 
 ical process, — and the rose is done. When 
 God makes a rose, he lets a bird or a puff of 
 wind drop a seed into the ground ; out of the 
 seed there emerges a stalk ; and out of the stalk, 
 branches; and on these branches, buds; and 
 out of these buds roses unfold ; and the rose is 
 never done, for it goes on endlessly repeating 
 itself. This is the difference between manufac- 
 ture and growth. Man's method is the method 
 of manufacture ; God's method is the method of 
 growth. What man makes is a finished product, 
 — death. What God makes is an always finish- 
 ing and never finished product, — life. What 
 man makes has no reproductive power within 
 itself. What God makes goes on reproducing 
 itself, with ever new forms and in ever new 
 vitality. The doctrine of evolution, in its radi- 
 cal form, is the doctrine that all God's processes 
 
CREATION BY EVOLUTION 17 
 
 are processes of growth, — not processes of 
 manufacture. 
 
 Evolution is the history of a process, not the 
 explanation of a cause. The doctrine of evolu- 
 tion is an attempt on the part of scientific men 
 to state what is the process of life; not an 
 attempt to state what is the cause of life. When 
 Isaac Newton discovered and announced the doc- 
 trine of attraction and gravitation, he did not 
 undertake to explain why the apple falls from 
 the bough to the earth, nor why the earth re- 
 volves around the sun in its orbit; he simply 
 stated what he had seen, — that all matter acts 
 as if its bodies were attracted to one another 
 inversely as the square of the distance. So the 
 evolutionist does not attempt to explain the 
 cause of phenomena; he simply recites their 
 history. 
 
 A correspondent recently wrote me a letter 
 saying in substance, " I am sorry that you have 
 taken up with that dangerous doctrine of evolu- 
 tion. Huxley and Darwin and Tyndall tell us 
 that matter somehow or other once upon a time 
 began to create itself. , ' He is mistaken. He 
 would find it difficult to point to page or para- 
 graph in any scientific writer as authority for 
 any such notion of evolution. Evolution does 
 not undertake to give the cause of phenomena 
 at all; it simply recites their processes. A 
 
18 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 man may be an atheistic evolutionist — that 
 is, he may believe that there is no intelligent 
 cause lying back of phenomena. Haeckel is an 
 atheistic evolutionist. Or he may be a theis- 
 tic evolutionist, — that is, he may believe that 
 the cause lying back of all phenomena is a 
 divine, intelligent, loving Person ; Dr. McCosh 
 of Princeton was a theistic evolutionist. The 
 evolutionist is simply one who understands the 
 history of life to be a history of growth. " Evo- 
 lution," says Mr. Huxley, " or development, is 
 at present employed in biology as a general 
 name for the history of the steps by which any 
 living being has acquired the morphological and 
 physiological characters which distinguish it ; " 
 and on that Mr. Henry Drummond, an eminent 
 evolutionist, comments as follows : — 
 
 " Evolution is simply history, a history of 
 steps, a general name for the history of the steps 
 by which the world has come to what it is. 
 According to this general definition, the story of 
 evolution is narrative. It may be wrongly told ; 
 it may be colored, exaggerated, over or under 
 stated, like the record of any other set of facts ; 
 it may be told with a theological bias, or with 
 an anti-theological bias ; theories of the process 
 may be added by this thinker or by that, but 
 these are not of the substance of the story. 
 Whether history is told by a Gibbon or a Green, 
 
CREATION BY EVOLUTION 19 
 
 the facts remain ; and whether evolution be told 
 by a Haeckel or a Wallace, we accept the narra- 
 tive so far as it is a rendering of nature, and 
 no more. It is true, before this story can be 
 fully told, centuries still must pass. At present 
 there is not a chapter of the record that is 
 wholly finished. The manuscript is already 
 worn with erasures, the writing is often blurred, 
 the very language is uncouth and strange. Yet 
 even now the outline of a continuous story is 
 beginning to appear, — a story whose chief cre- 
 dential lies in the fact that no imagination of 
 man could have designed a spectacle so wonder- 
 ful, or worked out a plot at once so intricate 
 and so transcendently simple." 
 
 Evolution, then, — let us understand this at 
 the outset, — is the history of a process, not the 
 explanation of a cause. The evolutionist be- 
 lieves that God's processes are the processes of 
 growth, not of manufacture. 
 
 We are all partial evolutionists. Every man 
 believes that to a large extent the divine pro- 
 cesses are processes of growth. He believes that 
 the rose grows from a seed or a cutting ; that all 
 the vegetable matter in the world has come to its 
 present condition by growth from earlier forms. 
 He believes that this principle of growth applies 
 to the animal as well as to the vegetable king- 
 dom. He believes that every horse was once a 
 
20 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 colt, and every man was once a babe. He be- 
 lieves, too, in growth as a principle of history : 
 that the American nation has grown from colo- 
 nial to national greatness; that literature has 
 grown from primitive to sublime forms. He 
 thus believes that most of the processes of God 
 are processes of growth. 
 
 The radical evolutionist believes that all divine 
 processes, so far as we are able to understand 
 them, are processes of growth; that as God 
 makes the oak out of the acorn, and the rose out 
 of the cutting, and the man out of the babe, and 
 the nation out of the colony, and the literature 
 out of the alphabet, so God has made all things 
 by the development of higher from lower forms. 
 He believes that, so far as he can see, God is 
 never a manufacturer, but always does His work 
 by growth processes. The best simple definition 
 of this process that I have ever seen is Le 
 Conte's: "Evolution is continuous progressive 
 change, according to certain laws and by means 
 I of resident forces." 
 
 It is, first, continuous progressive change. 
 The rose the man makes does not go through con- 
 tinuous progressive change. He makes a little 
 to-day, leaves it, begins again to-morrow, leaves 
 it a year, comes back next year. He finds that 
 he is making it wrong, changes his mind, makes 
 it over again. There is no necessary continuity 
 
CREATION BY EVOLUTION 21 
 
 in his work. The work that man does is not 
 done according to certain laws. It is often arbi- 
 trary. He makes the rose in one way to-day, 
 in another way to-morrow, simply because the 
 notion so takes him. His work is done by force 
 external to the thing that is made ; not by force 
 operating from within, but by force applied from 
 without. God's work, on the contrary, we evo- 
 lutionists believe, is the work of progressive 
 change, — a change from a lower to a higher 
 condition ; 1 from a simpler to a more complex 
 condition. It is a change wrought according to 
 certain laws which are capable of study. It is 
 never arbitrary. Finally, this process of growth 
 is produced by forces that lie within the phe- 
 nomena themselves. The tools that God uses 
 are in the structure that is being formed, or in 
 its environment. The force that makes the rose 
 what it is inheres in the plant, in the soil, in the 
 sunlight. God dwells in nature, fashioning it 
 according to His will by vital processes from 
 within, not by mechanical processes from with- 
 out. The former theory of creation was of crea- 
 tion by manufacture. It was that God said to 
 himself one day, six, eight, or ten thousand 
 years ago, " I will make a world ; " that He pro- 
 ceeded to make it, in six successive days ; and that 
 
 1 This is the object of evolution, though incidental to it are 
 other results, such as moral development or degeneracy. 
 
22 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 when six days were over the world was finished. 
 As science disclosed the history of the past, men 
 changed their conception of the creative days to 
 longer and yet longer epochs. But still the con- 
 ception of manufacture lingered in the thought 
 of the Church. Some of the old mediaeval writ- 
 ers undertook even to state what time of the year 
 the world was made ; one of them, I believe, 
 argues that it must have been in the autumn, 
 because apples were ripe. Still many persons 
 conceive of creation as a process of manufacture, 
 and of God as a kind of architect or master- 
 builder, laying foundations, putting up pillars, 
 carving, upholstering, decorating, — construct- 
 ing the edifice in carpenter fashion. 
 
 Over against this conception of creation by 
 manufacture, we are coming to accept the con- 
 ception of creation by evolution. It would re- 
 quire one far more familiar with scientific detail 
 than I am to give the process with scientific 
 accuracy ; but it is possible to indicate the broad 
 outlines, and I am facilitated in doing this by a 
 somewhat vague recollection of an experiment 
 which I saw performed by Dr. R. Ogden Dore- 
 mus many years ago. On the platform where 
 the chemist was performing his experiments was 
 a great glass box, and in that box a colorless 
 liquid, into which he poured a colored liquid, — 
 red, if my memory serves me right ; and running 
 
CREATION BY EVOLUTION 23 
 
 through this box, with little arms extending from 
 it, was a cylinder, with a crank at the top. 
 While we sat there this colored material gath- 
 ered itself together in a gobular form before 
 our eyes. It was of precisely the same specific 
 density as the colorless liquid in which it had 
 been plunged, so that there was no attraction 
 of gravitation to carry it to the bottom. Then 
 gradually, very slowly at first, the lecturer began 
 a movement with this crank, and the globe, fol- 
 lowing the cylinder which he revolved, began 
 revolving itself very slowly, and gradually more 
 and more rapidly, and, as it revolved, flattened 
 at the poles, and presently, as the cylinder be- 
 came more and more rapid, flung out from itself, 
 I forget now whether a ring or a single globe. 1 
 
 1 Dr. Doremus has kindly furnished me with the following 
 accurate account of this most interesting illustration of the pro- 
 cess of " Creation by Evolution." It is an illustration which 
 amounts to demonstration to any one who has ever seen it. 
 Olive oil (colored red that it might be better seen) was poured 
 on water. It floated on the denser liquid. Another portion 
 of the oil was poured in alcohol. It sank in this lighter liquid. 
 
 A third portion of the oil was poured into a carefully pre- 
 pared mixture of water and alcohol, having exactly the same 
 specific gravity as the oil. The oil assumed the shape of a 
 perfect sphere. The earth is round, the sun, moon, and planets 
 are round, every star that decorates the heavens is round; 
 hence they were once liquid, or are now fluid. 
 
 A glass axis inserted through the centre of the sphere of 
 oil was slowly revolved. The globe flattened at its poles 
 and dilated at its equator. Our earth has this shape. The 
 
24 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 So we saw, before our eyes, the nebular 
 hypothesis illustrated. In some far-off epoch, 
 
 globe of oil was revolved more rapidly. It then flattened to 
 a greater extent, or was more oblate, like the planet Jupiter, 
 when the difference between its polar and equatorial diameters 
 is 5000 miles. Its oblateness can be seen with a powerful 
 telescope. 
 
 Our earth revolves at its equator at the rate of 1000 milei 
 per hour, Jupiter over 26,000 miles per hour. Jupiter has the 
 density of water, while our earth is five times as dense ; — 
 these two causes account for the difference in figures or shapes 
 of these planets. 
 
 On turning the oil globe more rapidly, it formed a ring like 
 the rings of Saturn. When the speed of revolution was still 
 more increased the ring broke into many spheres, some large, 
 others small ; each of these revolved on its axis, around the 
 common centre. The sun turns from west to east ; Mercury, 
 nestling closest to our peerless parent, turns from west to east 
 on its axis and around the central sun ; so also Venus, the 
 Earth, Mars, the small planets beween Mars and Jupiter (over 
 200 in number), Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and the remotest, 
 Neptune, all revolve in this same direction, and in the same 
 plane. According to Herschel, Struve, Argelander, and other 
 astronomers, our sun with his princely retinue of planets, 
 satellites and fiery comets is flying through space towards the 
 star ir in the constellation Hercules, with the velocity of half 
 a million miles per diem. Maedler has proved that our 
 whole galaxy of stars is revolving in a mighty circle, the 
 star Alcyone, of the Pleiades, being nearest the central point. 
 " Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades ? " (Job 
 xxxviii. 31.) Eighteen million two hundred thousand years 
 must elapse to complete one revolution around this distant 
 centre. In this grand circular movement are minor rotations 
 (like eddies in a stream of water) of double, triple, and mul- 
 tiple stars, joining in the mazy celestial dance. 
 
 Dr. Lee, of the Lowell Observatory, while in Mexico dis- 
 
CREATION BY EVOLUTION 25 
 
 misty matter hung nebulous in the universe. 
 It came together as a globe under the law of at- 
 traction of gravitation. It began its revolution, 
 set in motion by that infinite and eternal energy 
 which is an infinite and eternal mystery, and 
 which I believe is God. As it revolved, by the 
 very process of revolution it flattened at the 
 poles. As it revolved it cooled, the mist turned 
 to water, the water to solid. From this re- 
 volving globe a ring, like the ring of Saturn, 
 was flung off, and the revolving ring itself was 
 broken by the very process of revolution into 
 separate luminaries. So grew the moons, so the 
 planetary system. In this globe was, as still 
 there is, life, — that is, an infinite and eternal 
 energy which is an infinite and eternal mystery, 
 that is, God. Out of this life, manifesting this 
 God, grew, as the rose grows from its seed, the 
 lower forms, and, by successive processes from 
 these lower forms, other higher forms, and 
 
 covered, since the 1st of last January, 300,000 double and 
 triple stars in the southern heavens. Thousands of other 
 stellar universes revolve in a manner similar to our own gal- 
 axy of suns. Some of the nebulae have the shape of a ring, 
 others are oval (because of being seen at an angle). Some 
 have a dumb-bell shape, which can be imitated by revolv- 
 ing the oil-globe in the mixture of alcohol and water, when 
 the axis is not exactly in the centre of the oil-sphere. Her- 
 schel asserted that some of the nebulas are so remote that 
 their light (with its velocity of over 186,000 miles per second) 
 has been 3,000,000 of years in reaching our eyes. 
 
26 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 from these forms others still higher, until at 
 last the world came to be what it is to-day. 
 There never was a time when the world was 
 done. It is not done to-day. It is in the mak- 
 ing. In the belief of the evolutionists, the 
 same processes that were going on in the crea- 
 tive days are going on here and now. Still the 
 nebulae are gathering together in globes; still 
 globes are beginning their revolution ; still they 
 are flattening at the poles ; still they are cooling 
 and becoming solid ; still in them are springing 
 up the forms of life. In our own globe the 
 same forces that were operative in the past to 
 make the world what it is are operative to-day : 
 still from the seeds are springing the plants; 
 still the mountains are being pushed up by vol- 
 canic forces below ; still chasms are being made 
 by the earthquake ; all the methods and all the 
 processes that went on in those first great days 
 are still proceeding. Creative days ! Every day 
 is a creative day. Every spring is a creative 
 spring. God is always creating. Such, briefly 
 and imperfectly outlined, is the doctrine of crea- 
 tion by evolution. 
 
 Does this doctrine deny, or imply a denial, 
 that there is intelligence in the universe? Is 
 my correspondent right who thinks that Spencer 
 and Huxley and Tyndall imagine that matter 
 makes itself and governs itself? Is it true 
 
CREATION BY EVOLUTION 27 
 
 that the evolutionist believes, or if he be logical 
 must believe, that there is no intelligence that 
 plans, no wisdom that directs ? Paley's famous 
 illustration suggests that a man going along 
 the road finds a watch ; picks it up ; examines 
 it ; sees that it will keep time ; knows that 
 there was some intelligence that devised this 
 watch. Suppose this watch which he picks up 
 and puts into his pocket, after he has carried 
 it for a year, produces another watch that will 
 keep time; does that show less intelligence, or 
 more ? Suppose this watch which he picks up 
 and carries in his pocket drops from itself in 
 a year's time a little egg, and out of that egg 
 there comes a perfect watch a year later ; does 
 that show less intelligence, or more ? Is the 
 natural rose, with all its forces within itself, 
 less wonderful than the artificial rose, which the 
 man makes in imitation of it out of wax ? The 
 processes of growth are infinitely more won- 
 derful than the processes of manufacture. It 
 is easier by far to comprehend the intelligence 
 that makes the cuckoo which springs from the 
 cuckoo clock to note the time, than to compre- 
 hend the intelligence that makes the living bird 
 which springs from his nest and sings his song 
 to the morning sun. Growth is more wonder- 
 ful than manufacture. Growth has in it more 
 evidence of marvelous intelligence than any 
 
28 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 manufacture. " In that statement appears the 
 clergyman," says the critic. No ! The state- 
 ment is Professor Huxley's : — 
 
 "The student of Nature wonders the more 
 and is astonished the less, the more conversant 
 he becomes with her operations ; but of all the 
 perennial miracles she offers to his inspection, 
 perhaps the most worthy of admiration is the 
 development of a plant or of an animal from its 
 embryo. Examine the recently laid egg of some 
 common animal, such as a salamander or a newt. 
 vlsljj a minute spheroid in which the best micro- 
 scope will reveal nothing but a structureless sac, 
 inclosing a glairy fluid, holding granules in sus- 
 pension. But strange possibilities lie dormant 
 in that semi-fluid globule. Let a moderate sup- 
 ply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and the 
 plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid, and 
 yet so steady and purpose-like in their succession, 
 that one can only compare them to those oper- 
 ated by a skilled modeler upon a formless lump 
 of clay. As with an invisible trowel, the mass 
 is divided and subdivided into smaller and 
 smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggre- 
 gation of granules not too large to build withal 
 the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And 
 then, it is as if a delicate finger traced out the 
 line to be occupied by the spinal column, and 
 moulded the contour of the body ; pinching up 
 
CREATION BY EVOLUTION 29 
 
 the head at one end, the tail at the other, and 
 fashioning flank and limb into due salamandrine 
 proportions in so artistic a way that, after watch- 
 ing the process hour by hour, one is almost in- 
 voluntarily possessed by the notion that some 
 more subtle aid to vision than an achromatic 
 would show the hidden artist, with his plan be- 
 fore him, striving with skillful manipulation to 
 perfect his work." 
 
 That is the account of an evolutionary pro- 
 cess by an evolutionist who certainly will not be 
 accused of theological prepossessions. 
 
 Does this doctrine of creation by evolution 
 take God away from the world? It seems to 
 me that it brings Him a great deal nearer. The 
 Hindu believed that God was too great to stoop 
 to the making of the world, so He hatched out 
 an egg from which issued a number of little 
 gods, and the little gods made the world. 
 Something like that has been our past philoso- 
 phy. A great First Cause in the remote past 
 set secondary causes at work, and we stand only 
 in the presence of secondary causes. But Her- . 
 bert Spencer, the typical agnostic evolutionist,! 
 affirms that we are ever in the presence of an 
 Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all/ 
 things proceed. True, Herbert Spencer says 
 that He is the Unknown; but the theist who 
 believes with Matthew Arnold that this Infinite 
 
30 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 and Eternal Energy is an energy that makes for 
 righteousness in human history, and the Chris- 
 tian theist who believes that this Infinite and 
 Eternal Energy has manifested Himself in Jesus 
 Christ, and has purpose and will and love and 
 intelligence, believes no less certainly than Her- 
 bert Spencer that we are ever in His presence. 
 There is no chasm of six thousand years between 
 the evolutionist and his Creator. The evolu- 
 tionist lives in the creative days and sees the 
 creative processes taking place before him. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE GENESIS OF SIN 
 
 The problem of sin is not to be confounded 
 with the fact of sin. As to the fact, there is no 
 room for question. All the great dramatists 
 have recognized it in their portrayal of remorse, 
 indignation, penalty, repentance, forgiveness, 
 restoration. The great historians have recog- 
 nized it, in depicting the struggle of righteous- 
 ness with moral evil. Religious worship is 
 largely founded upon it; for religious worship 
 is largely an endeavor of the worshiper to rid 
 himself of the present burden and the future 
 penalty of sin. All government recognizes it ; 
 for certainly the first if not also the chief func- 
 tion of government is to protect the innocent 
 from the sins of the sinful. He who denies the 
 fact of sin denies the police and the prison, the 
 temple and the priest, the battle-field and the 
 martyrdom, Shakespeare and iEschylus. The 
 problem is not, Is there sin ? but, Whence comes 
 it ? If we are to cure a disease, we must know 
 its nature and origin. What is the nature and 
 
32 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 origin of sin, the cure of which is alike the prob- 
 lem of government, education, and religion, — 
 of the courts, the school, and the church ? 
 
 To this question there are two answers, — the 
 theological and the evolutionary. The theologi- 
 cal is that God created man perfect, that man 
 fell by voluntary transgression of the law which 
 God imposed upon him, and that in consequence 
 of that fall sin entered the world and poisoned 
 the entire race, in one of three ways, — for on 
 this point theologians are not agreed : either be- 
 cause the whole race was in Adam as the oak is 
 in the acorn, and sinned with him ; or because 
 the whole race was represented by Adam and 
 is held responsible for his act, much as a nation 
 is held responsible for the acts of its representa- 
 tives ; or because the whole race descended from 
 Adam and inherited, by the law of heredity, his 
 sinful nature from him. 
 
 The evolutionary answer to this question, 
 What is Sin ? it is the object of this chapter to 
 give. 
 
 Man is an animal, — about that there can be 
 no question, — a vertebrate animal, belonging to 
 the class mammal, and by most scientists reck- 
 oned in the family of apes. And he has ascended 
 from a lower animal. Whether the whole hu- 
 man race has so ascended is not absolutely cer- 
 tain, — the so-called missing link has not been 
 
THE GENESIS OF SIN 33 
 
 discovered ; the fossil man is far removed from 
 the highest ape. But, wherever the race came 
 from as a race, there is absolutely no question 
 that every individual of the race has passed 
 through animal stages in reaching manhood. 
 Embryology has established beyond all question, 
 so far as accurate, scientific, microscopic exami- 
 nation can establish anything, that all animals 
 begin in germs so absolutely alike that the 
 finest microscope can detect no difference, and 
 in proceeding from this germ each individual 
 passes through successive stages of animal life. 
 Whether the race did or not, each individual 
 man does. He originates in a form nowise dif- 
 ferent from that of lower animals, depends upon 
 the same contrivances for his nutrition and de- 
 velopment in the earlier stages of his existence, 
 passes through the successive forms of lower or- 
 ders, is at one period of his existence in nowise 
 distinguishable from the earlier form of the dog, 
 a little later does not differ from that of the ape, 
 and so proceeds from one state to another until 
 he is born a human child. When the minis- 
 ter, whose acquaintance with theology is greater 
 than his acquaintance with science, asserts that 
 the notion that man has ascended from a lower 
 order is pure imagination, he speaks without 
 knowledge. The origin of the race is a matter 
 of hypothesis ; not so the origin of the indivi- 
 
34 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 dual. He is known to be derived from a germ 
 indistinguishable from that of the lower ani- 
 mals. The process of his development is seen 
 and known, not imagined. 
 
 In speaking upon embryology, I disavow 
 speaking as an expert. I only attempt to inter- 
 pret to non-expert readers the conclusions of ex- 
 pert observers, my object being, let me repeat, 
 not to demonstrate even the conclusions of em- 
 bryology, but to state them, so that the non- 
 expert reader may understand a little the ground 
 on which the scientific evolutionist bases his 
 acceptance of evolution as applied to the de- 
 velopment of man. To illustrate this conclu- 
 sion of embryology a little more fully, I quote 
 substantially, though with condensations, from 
 the volume " Darwin and After Darwin," by 
 George John Romanes, taking this volume sim- 
 ply because it is a convenient epitome and is in 
 the main untechnical in its statements. 
 
 All life begins with a germ-cell. " If the 
 theory of evolution is true, what should we ex- 
 pect to happen when these germ-cells are ferti- 
 lized and so enter upon their severally distinct 
 processes of development ? Assuredly we should 
 expect to find that the higher organisms passed 
 through the same phases of development as the 
 lower organisms, up to the time when their 
 higher characters begin to become apparent. 
 
THE GENESIS OF SIN 35 
 
 . . . And this is just what we do find. Take, 
 for example, the case of the highest organism, 
 man. Like that of all other organisms, unicel- 
 lular or multicellular, his development starts 
 from the nucleus of a single cell. . . . When 
 his animality becomes established, he exhibits 
 the fundamental anatomical qualities which 
 characterize such lowly animals as polyps and 
 jelly-fish, and even when he is marked off as 
 the vertebrate it cannot be said whether he is 
 to be a fish, a reptile, a bird, or a beast. Later 
 on, it becomes evident that he is to be a mam- 
 mal ; but not till later still can it be said to 
 which order of mammals he belongs." In the 
 chapter on " Embryology " Mr. Romanes traces 
 with illustrations the process through which the 
 individual man passes from this germ to his final 
 completion as an infant man. His illustrations 
 show, side by side, the embryos of a fish, a sala- 
 mander, a tortoise, a bird, a hog, a calf, a rabbit, 
 and a man, in three successive stages of develop- 
 ment. Interpreting these pictures, which speak 
 to the eye, Mr. Romanes truly says : " We can 
 see that there is very little difference between 
 the eight animals at the earliest of the three 
 stages represented, all having fish-like tails, gill- 
 slits, and so on. In the next stage further 
 differentiation has taken place, but it will be 
 observed that the limbs are still so rudimentary 
 
36 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 that even in the case of the man they are con- 
 siderably shorter than the tail ; but in the third 
 stage the distinctive characters are well marked." 
 In the light of these facts, the evolutionist can- 
 not doubt that the individual man ascended 
 from a lower animal condition ; that growth, or 
 development, is God's way of creating the indi- 
 vidual man ; and he not unnaturally concludes 
 that it is probable that the whole race similarly 
 proceeded from a lower animal condition, and 
 that growth or development has been God's way 
 of producing the race. 
 
 There are two methods which the Christian 
 teacher may pursue in meeting this conclusion : 
 he may declare that if this conclusion is accepted, 
 the Christian religion is overthrown, because the 
 Christian religion depends upon an acceptance 
 of the scientific accuracy of the first chapter of 
 Genesis ; or he may accept the conclusion of the 
 evolutionist as certainly probable, if not abso- 
 lutely demonstrable, and may attempt to show 
 that the Christian's faith in the reality of sin as 
 an awful fact, and the reality of redemption as 
 a glorious fact, is entirely consistent with the 
 opinion that man has ascended from a lower 
 animal order, and that development or growth 
 is God's way of doing things ; and he may main- 
 tain that the first chapters of Genesis are not to 
 be regarded as authoritative scientific statements 
 
THE GENESIS OF SIN 37 
 
 respecting the methods of creation, the origin of 
 the race, or its duration upon the earth. I firmly 
 believe that the former method, which sets theo- 
 logical theories against scientifically ascertained 
 facts, is fatal to the current theology and inju- 
 rious to the spirit of religion ; and that the sec- 
 ond method, which frankly recognizes the facts 
 of life, and appreciates the spirit of the scien- 
 tists, whose patient and assiduous endeavor has 
 brought those facts to light, will commend the 
 spirit of religion to the new generation, and will 
 benefit — not impair — theology as a science, by 
 compelling its reconstruction. 
 
 I accept, then, the conclusions of the embryo- 
 logist : we are animals, we ascended from lower 
 animals. Whether we like the fact or not, it is 
 a fact. 
 
 But we are more than animals. "We all know 
 that fact also. There is a great gap between 
 manhood and brutehood. It is shown by lan- 
 guage, which no brutes use in any perfection 
 approximating that of man. It is shown in 
 tools, which animals do not to any extent em- 
 ploy. It is shown in the largeness of reasoning 
 power, which immeasurably exceeds all reason- 
 ing power of animals. It is shown in the appar- 
 ently illimitable development possible in man, 
 while animal development halts at a clearly 
 marked line. It is shown, above all, in the 
 
38 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 moral and spiritual nature of man, — in his in- 
 dependent conscience, in his clear perception of 
 right and wrong, in his sense of the infinite and 
 the eternal, in his worship. Practically it may 
 be said that there is no race of men on the face 
 of the globe that has not something akin to wor- 
 ship, and no race of animals that has. 
 
 y^ Man, then, is an animal, and has ascended 
 from a lower animal ; but he is something im- 
 measurably more than an animal. How did he 
 get this something more ? At what stage in his 
 existence was it implanted in him ? In what 
 way? On this point the Church has never 
 
 J agreed. Theologians have been divided in opin- 
 ion into four schools, giving four separate an- 
 swers to this question. The first is creationism, 
 — the doctrine that into every man, at some 
 stage of his existence, presumptively at the time 
 of his birth, God, by a miraculous or supernat- 
 ural act, implants the divine spirit. The sec- 
 ond is traducianism, — the doctrine that at some 
 period in the history of the human race God 
 breathed the breath of divine life into some re- 
 mote ancestor, and that the race has inherited 
 that breath of life throughout all subsequent 
 ages. The third is evolutionism, — the doctrine 
 that this higher life of man, this moral, this 
 ethical, this spiritual nature, has been developed 
 by natural processes as the higher physical 
 
THE GENESIS OF SIN 39 
 
 phases of life have been developed by natural 
 processes. The fourth is conditional immortal- 
 ity, — the doctrine that the spiritual nature is 
 developed and made dominant in men only as 
 by faith they lay hold on God, and that there 
 are men upon the earth who to all intents and 
 purposes are but little higher than the animals, 
 and will sink back into the animal and finally 
 become extinct. Whichever of these views one 
 holds, he may still hold that man is two men. 
 He may think that the divine element is im- 
 planted in each individual at birth ; or he may 
 think that it was implanted in some individual 
 at a certain point in the race development and 
 has since been inherited by all his posterity ; or 
 he may think that it is implanted by a special 
 act of divine grace, not in all individuals, but 
 only in a certain elect circle, — those whom God 
 chooses, or those who choose to accept it ; or he 
 may believe that it comes through evolutionary 
 process eventually to all men, growing gradually 
 out of that which is not spiritual ; but, which- 
 ever theory of its origin he entertains, he may 
 be sure that this spiritual life exists to-day. We 
 have the spiritual life, — the life of conscience, \ 
 faith, hope, love. On this fact religion is based ; 
 it does not depend on the question where this 
 spiritual life came from, or at what point in the 
 development of the race or the individual it 
 
40 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 began to appear. For religion has to do with 
 what is and what is to be. It leaves science to 
 deal with the past. 
 
 The evolutionist, then, no less than the crea- 
 tionist, believes that every man is two men. He 
 believes that God made man out of the dust of 
 the earth, — that is, out of a lower order. Yes ! 
 even out of inorganic matter. He believes this 
 none the less because he thinks he can trace, in 
 imagination, the process by which during a long 
 course of ages the preparations were made for 
 the perfection of the animal man, and because 
 he knows that he can trace by observation the 
 process by which the individual animal man is 
 gradually formed out of a germ indistinguish- 
 able from that of other animals. He believes no 
 less than the creationist that God breathes into 
 man the breath of a divine life. He believes 
 this none the less because he thinks he can trace 
 the process by which reason is developed out of 
 instinct, and patience out of passivity, and sym- 
 pathy out of imagining the troubles of others, 
 and carefulness out of parental instinct, and 
 conscience out of approbativeness, and honesty 
 and honor out of self-interest. 1 In short, he 
 believes that development is a divine process as 
 firmly as the creationist believes that creation 
 
 1 See Drummond's Ascent of Man, chapter viii., and Dar- 
 win's Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, passim. 
 
THE GENESIS OF SIN 41 
 
 is a divine process, and no less divine because it 
 is gradual. 
 
 When this higher life is breathed into man 
 — whether by an instant act or a gradual pro- 
 cess is, religiously speaking, a matter of indiffer- 
 ence — man comes under the law of the higher 
 life. This law is always sovereign whenever, in 
 the process of evolution, the lower passes into 
 a higher stage of life. When the inorganic is 
 taken up into the plant and made vegetable, it 
 becomes subject to the law of vegetable life, and 
 if it does not obey the law of vegetable life it 
 sinks back into the inorganic, — that is, it dies. 
 When the vegetable is taken into the animal, the 
 vegetable becomes animal, — that is, it becomes 
 subject to the law of animal life. The cow does 
 not become grass, but the grass becomes cow, 
 and, being cow, becomes part of the animal 
 existence and subject to the laws of animal life ; 
 and if the laws of animal life are not obeyed, 
 that which was life sinks back into the inorganic 
 again, — that is, it dies. Similarly, when, in the 
 process of development, man rises out of the 
 animal stage and becomes a man, when he comes 
 into the condition in which he knows the moral 
 truth, and sees it, and is conscious of it, he 
 comes under the law of the moral life, as the 
 inorganic taken into the vegetable comes under 
 the law of the vegetable, as the vegetable taken 
 
42 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 into the animal comes under the law of f the ani- 
 mal. The human, the moment it passes the in- 
 visible boundary line and becomes human, comes 
 under the law of the human, — that is, under the 
 law of God, under the law of right and wrong. 
 Moral law is dependent, therefore, upon moral 
 development. What is right in one stage of 
 development becomes wrong when the indivi- 
 dual has passed into a higher stage of develop- 
 ment. The law of the animal is superseded by 
 the law of the spiritual. This fact we all recog- 
 nize. " Gluttony is not sin in a hog ; the greater 
 glutton, the better the breed. Combativeness 
 is not sin in a bull-dog ; the bitterer fighter, the 
 better the dog. To heap up wealth for another 
 to enjoy after they are dead is not sin in the 
 bees ; the more they gather and the less they 
 give, the more valuable the hive. To spend 
 life in mere pleasure of song and sunshine is 
 not sin in the bird ; the more careless the song- 
 ster, the sweeter the companionship. But to 
 man there is a higher life possible than to feed 
 with the hog, fight with the dog, gather with 
 the bee, or sing with the birds ; it is as he comes 
 to a knowledge of this higher nature that he 
 comes to a knowledge of good and evil." 1 We 
 come to Mount Sinai when we come to the 
 sense of right and wrong. Violation of this law 
 
 1 Evolution of Christianity, p. 225. 
 
THE GENESIS OF SIN 43 
 
 is sin, and sin is fall, and fall is fall downward, 
 not upward. 
 
 Did Adam fall, six thousand years ago ? It is 
 immaterial. Certainly if we found the story of 
 a garden with one fruit by eating which a man 
 would make himself immortal, and with another 
 fruit which would give him a consciousness of 
 good and evil, with a serpent which talked to 
 him, and with a God who walked in the garden 
 and from whom the man attempted to hide, — if 
 we found that in Greek, or Roman, or Hindu, 
 or Norse literature, we should say, That is beau- 
 tiful fable ; what truth can we find in it ? And I 
 do not see any reason why, finding it in Hebrew 
 literature, we should not say, That is beautiful 
 fable ; what truth is in that fable ? 
 
 Neither the author of Genesis, nor any one in 
 the Bible for him, claims that his account of the 
 creation was revealed to him. There is no rea- 
 son to think that it was so revealed, unless a 
 purely traditional theology constitutes such rea- 
 son. Even if we suppose that Genesis was writ- 
 ten by Moses, three or four hundred years 
 elapsed between the latest incident in Genesis 
 and the time of Moses. Moreover, Assyrian 
 tablets have been discovered which were in exist- 
 ence a thousand years before the time of Moses, 
 and which contain analogous accounts of the 
 Creation, the Fall, and the Deluge. For these 
 
44 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 reasons the modern Biblical scholar who believes 
 in what is called progressive revelation regards 
 the Book of Genesis as a collection of prehistoric 
 traditions rewritten. The value of the book 
 consists, not in its scientific accuracy respecting 
 creative processes, but in the religious spirit with 
 which these ancient traditions are rewritten, so 
 as to make them vehicles of moral and spiritual 
 truth. In a sense it is true, scientifically, that 
 God has made man out of the dust of the earth, 
 — that is, out of lower and earlier forms, reach- 
 ing back through various transformations even 
 to the inorganic ; and has breathed into him the 
 breath of life, — that is, in him is a spirit which 
 links him to the Divine. But the mechanical 
 conception of this process, which was apparently 
 in the mind of the writer of Genesis, is far tran- 
 scended in sublimity by the conception of this 
 process entertained by the modern evolutionist. 
 Innocence, temptation, fall, sin — this is the 
 biography of every man, save only Him who 
 passed from innocence to virtue through temp- 
 tation, yet without sin. Man cannot grow from 
 innocence to virtue without temptation ; he can- 
 not experience temptation without a possibility 
 of sin, — that is, of yielding to temptation ; and 
 yielding to temptation is fall. Every man 
 when he yields to temptation and sins falls from 
 a higher to a lower, from a spiritual to an ani- 
 
THE GENESIS OF SIN 45 
 
 mal condition. He falls back from that state 
 from which he had begun to emerge. It is true 
 that the animal man is worse in his animalism 
 than the animal from which he has emerged or 
 is emerging. The ferocity of the tiger is no 
 match for that of the ferocious man ; the intem- 
 perance of the brute is far less than that of the 
 brutalized man. How can it be otherwise when 
 the higher powers which God has conferred upon 
 him are subordinated to and made the instru- 
 ments of his animalism ? 
 
 Sin, then, is not a means to good. It is not 
 " good in the making." The fall is not a " fall 
 upward." Every yielding to temptation is a hin- 
 drance, not a help, to moral development ; but 
 every temptation offers what, rightly employed, 
 is an indispensable means of moral development. 
 For all moral development is through tempta- 
 tion to virtue. There can be no virtue without 
 temptation; for virtue is victory over tempta- 
 tion. An untempted soul may be innocent, but 
 cannot be virtuous, for virtue is the choice of 
 right when wrong presses itself upon us and de- 
 mands our choosing. How can we have courage, 
 unless there is danger and apprehension of the 
 danger? How can we have patience, unless 
 there are burdens to be borne and a desire to 
 remove the burdens ? How can we have fidel- 
 ity, unless there is some trust to be maintained 
 
46 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 and some temptation calling on us to leave the 
 trust and be false to it ? The scorn of " goody- 
 goody " is justified, for " goody-goody " is inno- 
 cence, not virtue ; and the boy who never does 
 anything wrong because he never does anything 
 at all is of no use in the world. Temptation 
 is struggle, and virtue emerges from struggle. 
 And we cannot have the choice of right without 
 the possibility of doing wrong; and choosing 
 wrong is sin ; and sin is fall ; because it is 
 choosing the animal from which we are emer- 
 ging rather than the spiritual condition into 
 which we have partially emerged. 
 
 Does this take away the reality — the awful 
 reality — of sin, or remove it from our conscious- 
 ness ? It brings sin closer to our consciousness 
 and makes it more real. A familiar story may 
 illustrate this : The elder Dr. Tyng was very 
 fond of children. He was preaching one Sun- 
 day in his Sunday-school room to his children. 
 He was not an evolutionist ; he lived before the 
 doctrine of evolution was known ; and as he was 
 a very orthodox clergyman, it is not probable 
 that he would have been an evolutionist if it 
 had been known. Nevertheless he was preach- 
 ing evolution without knowing it. He said to 
 the children : " There is the serpent, who goes 
 in sinuous, crooked ways — that is the liar; 
 there is the hog, who eats and eats, and cares 
 
THE GENESIS OF SIN 47 
 
 not for anything but eating — that is the glut- 
 ton ; there is the little boy or girl who likes to 
 pass before the glass and see how beautiful he 
 or she is — that is the peacock ; and there is the 
 passionate child who cannot control his temper 
 and flames out on every provocation — that is 
 the tiger." When he had finished his sermon 
 and announced the hymn, the children started 
 not all together ; his face flushed and he struck 
 the book a blow, and cried out, " Stop ! stop ! 
 stop ! " and a little girl back in the room, 
 standing on the pew, reached forward, and, 
 pointing her finger, called out, " Tiger ! " Dr. 
 Tyng laid down his book, walked down the aisle, 
 and took the little girl in his arms. He loved 
 little children. No girl would have come to his 
 arms under those circumstances if she had not 
 known his love. He brought her back to the 
 platform, and, holding her in his arms, he said, 
 " Children, she has told the truth ; I have been 
 fighting the tiger all my life, and I have not 
 got control of him yet ; do not let the tiger get 
 control over you." If a minister who is ortho- 
 dox of the orthodox desires to bring home to 
 children the fact of sin, and a little girl under- 
 stands the preaching and has it brought home to 
 her, and the preacher is preaching evolution, is 
 it not right to say that the doctrine of evolution 
 does not take away the consciousness of sin ? 
 
48 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 It brings that consciousness nearer. The ori- 
 gin of sin does not lie in remote history. Sin is 
 not a strange, mystic fact. Every man is two 
 men, — a divine man and a human man, an 
 earthly man and a super-earthly man; he is 
 linked to the lower, out of which he is emerging ; 
 he is linked to the upper, toward which he is 
 tending. We carry the animal with us. When 
 we indulge our appetite, or our greed, or our 
 covetousness, or our pride, or our vainglory, or 
 our selfishness, we are falling back into the ani- 
 mal, from which we are not yet emerged. Every 
 man is two men, — a centaur, part animal, part 
 man. Some have almost outgrown the animal, 
 and some have a very small man's head on a 
 very large beast's body. 
 
 " O wretched man that I am ! who shall 
 deliver me from this body of death ? " I have 
 read a tragic story of a Russian prisoner work- 
 ing in the mines chained to a fellow-prisoner who 
 died, and for forty-eight hours he remained in 
 that mine chained to a corpse. So Paul says of 
 himself : I am chained to a corpse ; who shall de- 
 liver me from this dead body ? One may be an 
 evolutionist, he may believe that the individual 
 emerged from a lower animal, he may believe 
 the whole race has emerged from a lower animal 
 condition, and yet he may believe that in this 
 emergence every individual comes under divine 
 
THE GENESIS OF SIN 49 
 
 law, and that every violation of that divine law 
 is a sin, and every sin is a falling back into the 
 animal condition ; and the only hope of himself 
 and the only hope of the race is in the power 
 that shall lift him up and out of his lower self 
 into his higher, truer, nobler self, until he shall 
 be no longer a son of the animal, but in very 
 truth a son of God. 
 
 | ,y&Z~ -tL*ysy>^ -y^'\JOQ ^^rt^C^ ^-*-o-ar A^& 
 v-^u-*--* <?u-->- i^vy^K 6^r4(-4si- «--o * 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE EVOLUTION OF REVELATION 
 
 It is said of Jesus that He grew in wisdom 
 and in stature. He did not know everything 
 in the beginning. His wisdom was a growth. 
 This is the universal law of the individual, who 
 always grows in his knowledge of what we call 
 religious truth, no less than in his knowledge of 
 what we call secular truth. He is no more born 
 with an accurate knowledge of God, truth, pu- 
 rity, righteousness, than with an accurate know- 
 ledge of geology, geography, astronomy, history, 
 or language. The simplest intellectual declara- 
 tions respecting God are unmeaning to a little 
 child, — as, God is a Person. The simplest 
 spiritual declarations respecting God mean but 
 little — as, God is love. To the child in the 
 infant class this does not and cannot mean what 
 it means to the grandmother, who has passed 
 through all the phases of love, and learned in 
 the school of experience all the meaning of love. 
 Does one ask, What does Christ mean by say- 
 ing that we must become as little children if we 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF REVELATION 51 
 
 would enter the kingdom of heaven ? He means 
 that, however much we know, we must be eager 
 to learn more. Does any one ask, What does 
 He mean by the saying, Of such is the kingdom 
 of heaven ? He means, out of such eagerness 
 to learn more, the kingdom of heaven is devel- 
 oped in the soul. We all practically recognize 
 the truth that the child must grow into the 
 knowledge of God, truth, duty. 
 
 The evolutionist believes that the race has 
 grown, as the individual grows, into the know- 
 ledge of God and His righteousness. He does 
 not believe that there was a perfect revelation 
 at first which man lost and is gradually recover- 
 ing. He believes that there has been an in- 
 creasing capacity to receive religious truth, and 
 therefore an increasing understanding of it. 
 
 We all believe that there has been such a 
 gradual development in all knowledge except 
 that which we call religious. I have, indeed, 
 heard of a minister who assured his congrega- 
 tion of his belief that Adam was acquainted 
 with the telephone. But this does not represent 
 the current belief in the ministry. That man- 
 kind has made a gradual, though by no means 
 steady, progress in its knowledge of the arts and 
 sciences, of the laws of health, of the conditions 
 of social progress, of political organization, of 
 commercial laws, no one questions. But these 
 
52 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 involve a knowledge of ethics, — or the laws of 
 right and wrong, — and are involved in a know- 
 ledge of God, since all life is a manifestation of 
 Him. It is as impossible to separate life into its 
 constituent elements, as to separate a river into 
 its separate drops. The man grows ; one part 
 is not instantly created and another part aban- 
 doned to growth. So the race grows ; one part 
 is not instantly created and another part aban- 
 doned to growth. In other words, conscience, 
 reverence, faith, hope, love, are as subject to 
 the laws of growth as the intellectual faculties 
 or the social impulses. And only as these divine 
 capacities grow is a knowledge of the divine 
 possible. It is as impossible to put a saint's 
 knowledge of God into a savage by an instanta- 
 neous process, as to put into him a scientist's 
 knowledge of nature. The proposition is un- 
 thinkable. If one believes in the evolution of 
 man, he must believe in the evolution of inspi- 
 ration and revelation. 
 
 To affirm that inspiration and revelation are 
 gradual processes is not to deny their reality. 
 To affirm that it is impossible to separate them 
 in human education from what we call the nat- 
 ural or secular elements is not to discard them. 
 The tree is dependent for its growth on both the 
 juices of the earth and the light of the sun. It 
 is not possible so to analyze the tree as to declare 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF REVELATION 53 
 
 what portions are dependent on the earth and 
 what on the sun. Still less is it possible even 
 to conceive of the sun as doing its work instantly 
 and creating its share of the completed tree, 
 and then leaving it, suspended, so to speak, in 
 airy nothingness, awaiting the development of 
 other parts by the slow process of earthy growths. 
 As little is it possible to separate the religious 
 from the secular, the revealed from the unre- 
 vealed, or even to imagine the divine truth in- 
 stantly created in a mind not yet grown large 
 enough to apprehend such truth. A people who 
 believed that Palestine was the world, and that 
 the sun and moon and stars were created as 
 luminaries to give it light, could not possibly re- 
 ceive that conception of the greatness of God 
 which is correlated with, and in some measure 
 grows out of, the modern conception of an illim- 
 itable universe. The degree of inspiration which 
 the race can receive at any period is dependent 
 upon the spiritual capacity it has attained. The 
 degree of revelation possible to man or through 
 man depends upon the intellectual and spiritual 
 stature of the man. 
 
 What do we mean by inspiration ? What by 
 revelation ? 
 
 Inspiration is inbreathing. It is an uplifting 
 influence of one spirit on another spirit. A con- 
 gregation listens to an inspiring address, an 
 
54 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 audience to inspiring music. We are inspired 
 by reading the records of past heroism. Emo- 
 tions, thoughts, feelings, pass from mind to 
 mind. One soul breathes life into another soul ; 
 God breathes his life into us all. This is inspi- 
 ration ; the elevating or clarifying influence 
 which one spirit may have upon another spirit. 
 Belief in divine inspiration is belief that God's 
 spirit has such an influence on human spirits. 
 
 Revelation is unveiling. It is the disclosure 
 of some truth not known before. There may 
 be inspiration without revelation ; there may be 
 revelation without inspiration. One may be 
 inspired and yet get no new view of truth ; one 
 may get a new view of truth and not be inspired. 
 For the truth may not be inspiring. It may be, 
 indeed, the reverse, — it may be depressing. In- 
 spiration, then, is the influence of one spirit — 
 and especially of the Divine Spirit — upon other 
 spirits. Revelation is the unveiling of truth 
 before not disclosed. To a considerable extent, 
 the Church formerly believed in revelation other 
 than through inspiration. The Christian evolu- 
 tionist believes in revelation only through inspi- 
 ration. A simple illustration will perhaps make 
 this clear. 
 
 When I went to college we studied chemistry 
 sitting in our seats, while the professor of chem- 
 istry revealed certain chemical truths to us, per- 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF REVELATION 55 
 
 forming the operations in the laboratory for us 
 while we looked on. We saw them, went away, 
 — and forgot what we had learned. To-day the 
 student of chemistry goes into the laboratory 
 himself. The teacher does not directly reveal 
 the truth to him, but patiently inspires him to 
 study for himself ; encourages him, guides him, 
 directs him, shows him how to make his own 
 investigations. Under the influence of that 
 guidance, that direction, that counsel, that inspi- 
 ration, the student works out the chemical laws 
 for himself as though he were a new investigator. 
 He also gets a revelation. But it is a gradual 
 revelation, under the inspiring influence of a 
 teacher. The modern Christian evolutionist be- 
 lieves that revelation has been made in this man- 
 ner to the world ; that God has inspired men in 
 their quest for truth, and that under that inspi- 
 ration, studying, meditating, laboring, they find 
 their way to the truth. 
 
 The evolutionist, then, believes that the truths 
 taught in the Bible have been unveiled by God 
 and man working together. God has put His 
 children in the world, as pupils are put in a 
 laboratory, and has set them to work on the 
 great problems of life — Who am I ? What 
 does this world mean ? Who is over me ? What 
 are the laws of the moral life ? How must I 
 conduct myself toward my neighbor ? How must 
 
56 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 he conduct himself toward me? What is our 
 future destiny? These problems God has left 
 us to work out for ourselves, by our own quest, 
 under His patient, guiding, inspiring influence. 
 The Bible is a record of man's laboratory work 
 in the spiritual realm, a history of the dawning 
 of the consciousness of God and of the divine 
 life in the soul of man. It contains the story 
 of his spiritual aspirations, his dim, half-seen 
 visions of truth, his fragments of knowledge, 
 his blunders, his struggles with the errors of 
 others, and with his own prejudices. 
 
 He who thus regards the Bible is not in the 
 least troubled by finding errors in it ; he expects 
 to find such errors. They do not in the least mili- 
 tate against the value of the Book. It is quite 
 immaterial to him that the world was not made 
 in six days ; that there never was a universal 
 deluge ; that Abraham mistook the voice of con- 
 science calling on him to consecrate his only son 
 to God, and interpreted it as a command to slay 
 his son as a burnt offering ; that Israel misin- 
 terpreted righteous indignation at the cruel and 
 lustful rites of the Canaanitish religion for a 
 divine summons to destroy the worship by put- 
 ting the worshipers to death; that a people 
 undeveloped in moral judgment could not and 
 did not discriminate between formal regulations 
 respecting camp life and eternal principles of 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF REVELATION 57 
 
 righteousness, such as, Thou shalt love thy neigh- 
 bor as thyself, but embodied them in the same 
 code, and seemed to regard them as of equal 
 authority ; that a people half emancipated from 
 the paganism which imagines that God must be 
 placated by sacrifice before He can forgive sins 
 gave to the sacrificial system that Israel had 
 borrowed from paganism the same divine author- 
 ity which they gave to those revolutionary ele- 
 ments in the system that were destined eventu- 
 ally to sweep it entirely out of existence. 
 
 These and kindred errors do not have the 
 least tendency to shake that faith in the Bible 
 which regards it as containing the history of a 
 progressive revelation. He who so regards the 
 Bible does not believe that it is inerrant and 
 infallible, or that it claims to be so, or that 
 belief that the writers were inspired and the 
 writings contain a revelation from God to man 
 involves belief that it is inerrant and infallible. 
 To him the Bible is a collection of literature, 
 containing in a preeminent measure the growth 
 of the consciousness of God in the human soul, 
 as interpreted by the preeminent religious lead- 
 ers of a preeminently religious people. The 
 descriptions of nature which it contains are 
 scientifically inaccurate; but they are written 
 by men who saw God in nature and interpreted 
 nature as itself an interpreter of God. Words- 
 
58 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 worth, not Huxley, is the English analogue of 
 the Hebrew writer on nature. The historians 
 composed their histories out of such material as 
 they could gather, much as historians do in our 
 own time. These historians are often inaccu- 
 rate in details ; but the writers were prophets 
 who saw and traced the processes which God 
 was working out in the history of Israel. The 
 lawgivers enunciated some principles of eter- 
 nal obligation, some provisions convenient at 
 the time but long since obsolete, and some laws 
 because, as Christ said, of the hardness of the 
 people's hearts, — that is, because the people 
 were not ready for anything better; but they 
 sought to interpret and apply to the life of the 
 nation the divine principles of righteousness in 
 so far as they understood these principles and 
 their application was practicable in their time. 
 The fiction of the Bible — the historical ro- 
 mances in the Old Testament and the parables 
 in the New Testament — is narrated not to en- 
 tertain or amuse, but to elucidate a principle or 
 inspire life. It is not in the literal accuracy of 
 science, history, law, or narrative that the value 
 of the Bible is to be found, but in its spirit. 
 And that spirit is all the more valuable to us 
 because it is that of men of like passions as we 
 ourselves are, struggling with analogous doubts 
 and difficulties toward God, and His truth, and 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF REVELATION 59 
 
 His righteousness. When the Bible is thus re- 
 garded as the sifted literature of a people whose 
 genius was spiritual, as the genius of Rome 
 was legal, as that of Greece was philosophical, 
 and as that of the Anglo-Saxon has been com- 
 mercial, the intellectual and moral difficulties 
 disappear which the unscriptural dogma, of in- 
 fallibility has created. He who thus believes 
 in the evolution of revelation no longer has to 
 tease his mind by arguing that the creative days 
 were aeons, that the sun standing still was an 
 optical delusion due to peculiar refraction of its 
 rays, and that some whales have throats big 
 enough to allow the passage of a man. He 
 frankly treats the stories of creation, of Joshua's 
 campaign, and of Jonah's adventures as litera- 
 ture characteristic of the childhood age of the 
 world, and looks for the moral lessons which 
 lie behind them. He no longer threatens the 
 integrity of his conscience by endeavoring to 
 reconcile the imprecatory Psalms or the massa- 
 cre of the Canaanites with Christ's command to 
 " love your enemies." He says with Dr. John 
 Watson : " When the massacre of the Ca- 
 naanites and certain proceedings of David are 
 flung into the face of Christians, it is no longer 
 necessary to fall back on evasion or special 
 pleading. It can be frankly admitted that, 
 from our standpoint in this year of grace, such 
 
60 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 deeds were atrocious, and that they could never 
 be according to the mind of God, but that they 
 must be judged by the date, and considered the 
 defects of elementary moral processes." 
 
 The notion that inspiration and revelation 
 necessarily involve inerrancy and infallibility is 
 neither consonant with the claims of the Bible 
 writers nor with the general current of opinion 
 in the Christian Church. Christ repudiates 
 certain of the ancient laws, supplements others, 
 gives a revolutionary meaning to still others, and 
 affirms of others that they were concessions to 
 popular prejudice and sentiment. Paul declares 
 of himself that he knows only in part and 
 prophesies in part, and sees through a glass 
 darkly, and of Peter that he dissembled and 
 walked not according to the truth of the Gospel. 
 And Peter says of Paul that he sometimes 
 writes in such a way that it is hard to tell what 
 he means. As to the testimony of the Church, 
 there is no room for quotations here. Let the 
 reader, for both these points, read Dean Farrar's 
 " The Bible : its Meaning and Supremacy." 
 
 It must be frankly conceded that the question 
 at issue between the modern critic and the old 
 orthodoxy is not an insignificant one. It is not 
 merely a question of dates and authorship, — a 
 question whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch, 
 or how many of the Psalms were written by 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF REVELATION 61 
 
 David, or whether there were two Isaiahs or only 
 one. It is a profoundly serious one. The old 
 orthodoxy is right in regarding the new criti- 
 cism as revolutionary. It is revolutionary in its 
 treatment of the Bible, as the Protestant refor- 
 mation was revolutionary in its treatment of the 
 Church. It denies the infallibility of the Bible, 
 as the Protestant reformation denied the infal- 
 libility of the Church. There is no infallible 
 authority. Infallible authority is undesirable. 
 God has not given it to His children. He has 
 given them something far better, — life. That 
 life can come only through struggle. There is 
 as little a short and easy way to truth as to vir- 
 tue. The knowledge of truth can come only by 
 conflict with error, as the power of virtue can 
 come only by conflict with temptation. The 
 Bible is the record of the experiences of devout 
 men struggling toward that knowledge of God 
 which is life eternal ; it is given to us, not to 
 save us from struggle, and growth by struggle, 
 but to inspire us to struggle that we may grow. 
 
 The Bible is not one homogeneous book, 
 but a collection of literature, gathered out of a 
 much larger range of literature, and embodying 
 the history of the growth of the consciousness 
 of God in one people, preeminent among the 
 peoples of their time for the perception of God. 
 It is the sifted utterances of the chosen prophets 
 
62 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 of a peculiar people, peculiar in their spiritual 
 genius. It is inspired, because the lives of the 
 men and the hearts of the writers were lifted 
 above the common errors and prejudices of their 
 time ; not because they were wholly freed from 
 human prejudice and misconception. It con- 
 tains a revelation of God ; but the revelation is 
 one in human experience, and subject to the 
 adumbrations of human experience. 
 
 The question has been and will be asked 
 whether he who believes in the evolution of rev- 
 elation must not believe that spiritual develop- 
 ment will littt give the Church greater prophets 
 than Israel, and greater apostles than Paul; 
 whether, in short, it is not time to construct a 
 new Bible out of modern literature, which will 
 take the place of the older Bible, composed 
 wholly of Hebrew literature. It might, perhaps, 
 be a sufficient reply, for one in a polemical mood, 
 that there is no objection to the construction of 
 such a Bible, which, when constructed, would 
 have to take its place with the Hebrew Bible 
 in a struggle for existence with a resultant sur- 
 vival of the fittest. Certainly no one who be- 
 lieves in the Bible as a supreme book would 
 fear the challenge. It might be further added 
 that most devout souls do supplement the Bible 
 by other and more modern devotional literature. 
 We nourish our , spiritual life, not only on the 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF REVELATION 63 
 
 lyrics of the Hebrew Psalter, but also on those 
 of Faber and Whittier ; not only on the stories 
 of Ruth and Esther, but also on that of the 
 Pilgrim's Progress ; not only on the Gospel of 
 John and the Epistles of Paul, but also on the 
 Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis and 
 the Holy Living and the Holy Dying by Jeremy 
 Taylor. The spirit of the Bible has run far 
 beyond the confines of that ancient literature ; 
 and wherever one finds in spoken or in writ- 
 ten word that which clarifies faith, strengthens 
 hope, and enriches love, he is finding a Bible 
 message, whoever interprets it to him. 
 
 But the philosopher will also perceive that 
 the doctrine of evolution does not necessarily 
 mean that the geniuses of a later age will tran- 
 scend those of the earlier ages. The spiritual 
 evolutionist does not believe that man is the 
 mere creature of his circumstances. He does 
 not believe that " the differences between one 
 nation and another, whether in intellect, com- 
 merce, art, morals, or general temperament, 
 ultimately depend, not upon any mysterious 
 properties of race, nationality, or any other 
 unknown and unintelligible abstractions, but 
 simply and solely upon the physical circum- 
 stances to which they are exposed." He does 
 not deny the reality of character, and the effect 
 of character on life. He does not think that 
 
64 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 " if W. Shakespeare had died of cholera infan- 
 tum, another mother at Stratford-upon-Avon 
 would needs have engendered a duplicate copy 
 of him, — just as the same stream of water 
 will reappear, no matter how often you pass a 
 sponge over the leak, so long as the outside 
 level remains the same." 1 All that the believer 
 in evolution and revelation affirms or is called 
 upon by his philosophy to affirm is that spiritual 
 development in the Hebrew race was analogous 
 in its process to the spiritual development to be 
 seen in other peoples. There is one character- 
 istic feature in all such development which calls 
 for greater consideration than I think has yet 
 been given to it. Evolution in the race appears 
 rather in a broadening of capacity to receive 
 than in a creation of capacity to impart. At 
 certain epochs great men appear who, as types, 
 seem never to be surpassed in subsequent gen- 
 erations. But the capacity to understand and 
 appreciate is surpassed in subsequent gener- 
 ations. Greater writers of epic than Homer, 
 greater writers of philosophy than Plato and 
 Aristotle, greater dramatists than Shakespeare, 
 the world has never seen. We are still study- 
 ing Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, with profit ; 
 
 1 See Professor W. James' reply to Grant Allen in The Will 
 to Believe, p. 235, originally printed in the Atlantic Monthly 
 for October, 1880. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF REVELATION 65 
 
 they are still our teachers. But more people 
 understand them, and understand them better, 
 than in their own time. So, greater interpreters 
 of the divine law than Moses, greater preachers 
 of righteousness and mercy than Amos and 
 Hosea, greater singers of God and the divine 
 life than the authors of the Psalter — let me 
 say, than David, whom I count the greatest of 
 them all — greater interpreters of the Christ 
 life than Paul, never have lived, — perhaps 
 never will live. "We do not look for evolution 
 to produce greater poets than Homer, Dante, 
 Milton, and Shakespeare, nor greater teachers 
 of righteousness than Moses, David, Isaiah, and 
 Paul. But the phenomenon which we call in- 
 spiration in the realm of religious thought is not 
 more mysterious than the phenomenon which 
 we call genius in the realm of secular thought. 
 Perhaps the best explanation of both is that 
 each is a scintillation of the mind of God in and 
 through the minds of men. Certainly the one 
 is as consistent with theistic evolution as the 
 other. Such men are the instruments of growth ; 
 if the reader pleases, the seeds of future life. 
 
 The Bible, then, is a unique literature, — 
 peculiar not in the process of its formation, but 
 in the spirit which pervades it. It is a record 
 of the gradual manifestation of God to man and 
 in human experience ; in moral laws, perceived 
 
66 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 by and revealed through Moses, the great law- 
 giver, and by successors imbued with his spirit 
 and speaking in his name ; in the application 
 of moral laws to social conditions by great 
 preachers of righteousness ; in human experi- 
 ences of goodness and godliness, interpreted by 
 great poets and dramatists ; and finally consum- 
 mated in the life of Him who was God manifest 
 in the flesh, in whom the word, before spoken 
 by divers portions and in divers manners, was 
 shown in a spotless character and a perfect life. 
 For beyond this revelation, in His Anointed 
 One, of a God of perfect love abiding in perfect 
 truth and purity, there is nothing conceivable 
 to be revealed concerning Him. Love is the 
 highest life ; self-sacrifice is the supremest test 
 of love ; to lay down one's life in unappreciated, 
 unrequited service for the unloving, is the high- 
 est conceivable form of self-sacrifice. It is not 
 possible, therefore, for the heart of man to con- 
 ceive that the future can have in store a higher 
 revelation of God's character, or a higher ideal 
 of human character, than that which is afforded 
 in the life and passion of Jesus Christ. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE PLACE OF CHKIST IN EVOLUTION 
 
 In this chapter it is no part of my ambition, 
 nor even of my desire, to explain the mystery 
 of the character of Jesus Christ. Every man 
 is in some sense a mystery to other men, and 
 the greater the man, the greater the mystery. 
 Who comprehends Daniel Webster? or Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare ? or Plato ? We do not under- 
 stand genius. How much less may we be ex- 
 pected to understand Him who, on any estimate 
 of His being, must be accounted the greatest 
 moral and spiritual genius the world has ever 
 seen ? I do not, therefore, propose to offer a 
 psychology of Jesus Christ, to measure Him, to 
 belittle Him with definitions. I only endeavor 
 to point out the place which He occupies in life 
 according to the theory of a Christian evolution- 
 ist ; what His relation is to what went before, 
 and to what comes after, in the growth of the 
 universe. 
 
 " In the beginning," says John, " was the 
 Word, and the Word was with God, and 
 
68 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 the Word was God." What does that mean? 
 What is a word ? It is a manifestation of the 
 soul. A friend is sitting at your side in absent- 
 minded meditation ; you cannot imagine what 
 is passing through his mind. Presently he 
 wakes out of that absent-mindedness ; he turns 
 to you, looks you in the face, speaks to you, 
 and in that speech reveals to you what is going 
 on within, which has been hidden. The word 
 is the manifestation of the invisible spirit. 
 Now, the declaration of John is that God was 
 always a Word. He never was in absent-minded 
 meditation. From eternity He has been speak- 
 ing ; He has always been manifesting Himself. 
 He did not six thousand years ago resolve to 
 manifest Himself in nature and so begin a crea- 
 tion. He has always been manifesting Him- 
 self in creation, and all the works of nature are 
 the revelation and the disclosure of the infinite 
 and eternal energy which is behind them, work- 
 ing out an intellectual process in and through 
 them. As the picture is the interpretation of 
 the artist, as the book is the interpretation of 
 the author, as the speech is the interpretation 
 of the orator, so the universe is the interpre- 
 tation of the universal Spirit, who is speaking 
 through every singing bird, every blossoming 
 flower, every earthquake, every storm and tem- 
 pest, everything beautiful, everything awful, 
 
THE PLACE OF CHRIST IN EVOLUTION 69 
 
 everything terrible, everything sublime. He 
 speaks in His world. 
 
 And He speaks through men ; through men 
 who have heard in His voice what other men did 
 not hear, and have felt in His presence what 
 other men did not feel. He spoke in past ages 
 to prophetic men, not only in the Hebrew nation, 
 but in many nations, inspiring men to a diviner 
 life, leading them on and up to larger living. 
 But preeminently He spoke to the Hebrew 
 nation, because that Hebrew nation was pre- 
 eminently ready to receive Him. Why some 
 soils are fertile and others are not, who can 
 tell ? Why some minds are fertile and others 
 are not, who can tell ? Why some nations are 
 fertile and others are not, who can tell ? This 
 is a part of the mystery of life. But in this 
 nation there arose prophets, and to these pro- 
 phets this ever-speaking God spoke, and to them 
 He manifested Himself, and the Bible is the 
 gathered utterances of the inspired thinkers of 
 an inspired race. The Bible is not what it is 
 sometimes called, — the Word of God. It is 
 never so called in the Bible. The Word of God 
 includes all the languages in which God has 
 ever spoken — to all races, in all ages, under 
 all circumstances. The Bible is one of His 
 many words, spoken through prophets. Jesus 
 Christ is "the Word become flesh," — that is, 
 
70 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 it is the manifestation of God in a human life 
 and character. He who has from eternity been 
 a self-revealing God spake in the world's his- 
 tory first in works, then through the prophetic 
 utterances of men who could better hear and 
 understand than could the great majority of 
 mankind, and at last, when the fullness of time 
 came, He spoke by coming into one human life 
 and filling it full of Himself. 
 
 Imagine for one moment that God desires to 
 reveal Himself to the human race ; how can He 
 make that revelation except in the terms of a 
 human experience ? This is what He has done. 
 He who, in olden time, spoke through prophets ; 
 He who, from the beginning, was the Word, 
 when the race, in the spiritual process of its de- 
 velopment, was ready for that later disclosure, 
 entered into one human life and filled it full of 
 Himself, that by looking at that life we might 
 comprehend what the life of God is in the world. 
 This is what the author of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews declares : " God, having of old time 
 spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers 
 portions and in divers manners, hath at the end 
 of these days spoken unto us in His Son, whom 
 He appointed heir of all things, through whom 
 also He made the worlds." First in fragments, 
 in partial utterances, in broken speech He re- 
 vealed little parts of Himself ; these men can 
 
THE PLACE OF CHRIST IN EVOLUTION 71 
 
 comprehend only in single letters which men 
 must learn, — for they must understand the al- 
 phabet before they can understand the grammar 
 of divinity ; later He comes and fills one man with 
 Himself and makes that One stand out in human 
 life as the revelation and disclosure of Himself. 
 This is what John says : " That which we have 
 seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and 
 which our hands handled, concerning the Word 
 of life, . . . declare we unto you." As the 
 artist transcends all his pictures, as the orator 
 transcends all his speeches, so God transcendsV 
 all manifestations of God. It is that concern-^ 
 ing the Word which the beloved disciple has 
 seen, and that only, which he can declare to 
 others. This is the meaning of the heavenly 
 voice : " This is my beloved Son." He is the 
 Son of God, because all his life is brooded by, 
 begotten of, proceeds from the Father. Some 
 of our life does, and some does not. We walk 
 in the world like Siamese twins, joined together, 
 now speaking the life of God, and now speak- 
 ing the life of the world. We are Seventh of 
 Romans, flesh and spirit in combat with each 
 other ; sons of the earth and sons of God 
 strangely commingled. He was the only begot- 
 ten Son of God, because all his life flowed from 
 the divine fountain and the divine source. This 
 is the meaning of such declarations as that of 
 
72 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 Paul : " In him dwelleth all the fullness of the 
 Godhead bodily." He was One into whom the 
 holy affluence of the divine nature was poured, 
 that He might set it forth to men. This is the 
 meaning of Paul's other declaration : " God was 
 in Christ." Jesus Christ was the tabernacle in 
 whom the self -revealing God dwelt, and through 
 whom He revealed Himself. In short, Jesus 
 Christ was God manifest in the flesh ; that is, 
 j'such a manifestation of God as was possible in 
 \jl human life, a manifestation of what Dr. van 
 Dyke has well called " the human life of God." 
 Jesus Christ did not manifest all the qualities 
 God. There is greater manifestation of 
 power in the earthquake and the tornado than 
 was manifested in the stilling of the tempest ; 
 greater mechanical skill manifested in the flower 
 than in anything that Christ wrought ; greater 
 affluence of beneficence in every annual har- 
 vest than in the feeding of five thousand. But 
 the love, the patience, the fidelity, the truth, 
 the long-suffering, the heart of the Infinite and 
 Eternal Energy, comes to its fruition and its 
 manifestation in this one incomparable life, — 
 God manifesting Himself in a human life and 
 in human relations. Jesus Christ is the image 
 of God, — God brought within the horizon of 
 humanity, God adumbrated, says Mr. Beecher, 
 that we may look at Him ; taking little steps by 
 
 c. 
 
THE PLACE OF CHRIST IN EVOLUTION 73 
 
 our side, says Dr. Parkhurst, that we may walk 
 with Him. God is always manifesting Himself, 
 and He is manifesting Himself by successive 
 manifestations : first in nature ; then in the 
 prophets ; then in an inspired race ; last of all, 
 in one man whom He fills full of Himself. 
 
 Does this divinity in Christ differ in kind, or 
 only in degree, from the divinity in men ? There 
 are differences in degree so great that they be- 
 come equivalent to a difference in kind ; but, 
 with this qualification, I answer unreservedly, the \ 
 difference is in degree and not in kind. There 
 are not two kinds of divinity, and cannot be. 
 The divinity in man is not different in kind from 
 the divinity in Christ, because it is not different j 
 in kind from the divinity in God. If it is, then \ 
 there are two kinds of divinity ; and two kinds 
 of divinity means two kinds of divinities ; that 
 is polytheism. Patience is divine, hope is divine, 
 purity is divine, righteousness is divine, love is 
 divine. There are not two kinds of patience, 
 hope, purity, righteousness, love, — one of which 
 is divine, the other human. What is the mean- 
 ing of Paul's teaching but this : that we are to 
 have the patience of Christ ; that we are to have 
 the righteousness of God ; that we are to be pure 
 even as He is pure ; that the divine qualities in 
 us are to be transcripts, reflections, repetitions, 
 of the divine qualities in the Everlasting Father. 
 
74 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 This is what Paul means when he says that our 
 righteousness is of God ; that is, it is God's 
 own righteousness reproduced in us ; any other 
 is a false righteousness, is indeed no righteous- 
 ness at all. 1 Our divinity is the same in kind as 
 Christ's divinity, because it is the same in kind 
 as God's divinity; because there are not, and 
 cannot be, two kinds of divinity. If we believe 
 this, if we believe that evolution is simply God's 
 method of manifesting Himself, then we need not 
 be afraid to say that Jesus Christ is the supreme 
 product of evolution in human history, for this 
 simply means that Jesus Christ is the supreme 
 manifestation which history affords of the divine. 
 Does, then, evolution end in the manger or at 
 the cross ? No. For Jesus Christ did not come 
 into the world merely to be a spectacle, merely 
 to show us who and what God is, and then de- 
 part and leave us where we were before. " I am 
 the door," He says. A door is to push open and 
 go through. He is the door ; through Him God 
 enters into humanity. He is the door ; through 
 Him humanity enters into God. He has come 
 into the world in order that we, coming to some 
 
 1 The righteousness, the patience, the hope, the peace, the 
 joy, the holiness of God, or of Christ, are each declared to 
 belong to the child of God. Romans iii. 22 ; 2 Thessalonians 
 iii. 5 ; Romans xv. 13 ; Philippians iv. 7 ; Colossians iii. 15 ; 
 2 Thessalonians iii. 16 j John xv. 11 j xvii. 13 ; 1 Peter i. 16 ; 
 Leviticus xi. 44. 
 
vni vtKSfTY/ 
 
 THE PLACE OF CHRIST IN EVOLUTION 75 
 
 knowledge and apprehension of the divine na- 
 ture, coming to understand what divine justice, 
 divine truth, divine life, divine purity, divine 
 love are, may the better enter into that life and 
 be ourselves filled with all the fullness of God. 
 There is not, I think, one epithet applied to 
 Jesus Christ in the New Testament which, in 
 a modified form, is not also applied to the dis- 
 ciples of Christ. He is the light of the world ; 
 and we are to be lights in the world. He is the 
 image of God ; and we are made in God's image, 
 and have despoiled ourselves of that image. He 
 is the brightness of God's glory; and we are 
 ourselves to show forth the glory of God. He 
 is King of kings ; and we are kings. He is the 
 great High Priest ; and we are priests. He is 
 the only begotten Son of God ; and we are sons 
 of God. He is filled with all the fullness of the 
 Godhead bodily ; and we are inspired to pray 
 that we, too, may be filled with all the fullness 
 of God. And the consummation of evolution, 
 the consummation of redemption, — the one term 
 is scientific, the other theological, but the process 
 is the same, — the consummation of this long 
 process of divine manifestation, which began in 
 the day when the morning stars sang together, 
 will not be until the whole human race be- 
 comes what Christ was, until the incarnation so 
 spreads out from the one man of Nazareth that 
 
76 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 it fills the whole human race, and all humanity 
 becomes an incarnation of the divine, the infi- 
 nite, and all-loving Spirit. What Jesus was, 
 humanity is becoming. 
 
 I can no longer, then, think of the incarnation 
 as a divine intervention in an otherwise undivine 
 life, beginning eighteen centuries ago, lasting 
 thirty-three years, and then ceasing, any more 
 than I can think of creation as the production 
 of matter, force, and law six thousand years 
 ago, which have since been left to work out their 
 own results with occasional interruptions by the 
 Almighty Creator. All life is God ; all force 
 is God. If we could conceive that God should 
 Y^ cease to live, the universe would be a corpse. 
 No bird would sing, no fish would swim, no apple 
 would fall nor wind blow, no planet would move 
 in its appointed orbit, no man or woman would 
 speak or think or breathe. The universe would 
 be dead, for God is its life; the world would 
 become one vast cemetery, for God is our life. 
 Evolution is not the operation of forces which 
 God once let loose and still controls. The evo- 
 lutionist does not believe that God created pro- 
 toplasm and left protoplasm to create everything 
 else. Evolution is God's way of doing things. 
 All force is the product of God's will and always 
 subject to it; what we call law is but God's 
 habit. It is literally true that in Him we live 
 
THE PLACE OF CHRIST IN EVOLUTION 77 
 
 and move and have our being ; so literally true 
 that if we ceased to be in Him we could neither 
 live, nor move, nor have any being. All good- 
 ness, truth, purity, valor, honor, righteousness, 
 all patriotism, all martyrdoms, all patient bur- 
 den-bearing, all conjugal love, all parental love, 
 all child-love, all friendships and fellowships, all 
 that is noble, true, and good, have their inspira- 
 tion in Him, and are manifestations of Him. All 
 growth in goodness, as all growth in the material 
 universe, has its secret in His imparted life. And 
 Jesus Christ is the supreme manifestation of 
 God in past history, and the source and inspira- 
 tion of all that is best in subsequent manifesta- 
 tions of God in Christian history. 
 
 To sum all up in a few words : God is reveal- 
 ing Himself to humanity. He is a Word, al- 
 ways speaking. He speaks through His works ; 
 all nature interprets Him to us. He speaks 
 through His prophets; all men who have felt 
 the inspiration of His presence interpret Him 
 to us. He speaks in the one incomparable life, 
 lived for three short years in the little province 
 of Palestine that we might see how God would 
 live on the earth and does live in the universe, 
 that is, might know the heart of God. When 
 we stand at the grave that covers the loved form 
 of one dear to us, we may know that He shares 
 in our tears, as Jesus Christ shared in the tears 
 
78 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 of Mary and Martha at the grave of Lazarus. 
 When we have sinned and are bearing the 
 shame of our sin in our anguish-stricken hearts, 
 we may know that He feels toward us as Christ 
 felt toward the blushing woman to whom he 
 said, " Go in peace, and sin no more." When 
 we come into our church service, and then go 
 from it to the street to oppress the poor, cover- 
 ing our iniquity by our garments of piety, and 
 deflect our own consciences from condemnation 
 by our prayers and our hymns, we may see 
 the divine finger of His scorn pointed at us 
 and hear the thunder of His tones, "Scribes 
 and Pharisees ! hypocrites ! who devour widows' 
 houses, and for a pretense make long prayers." 
 And all this is that He may make that other 
 and supreme revelation of Himself in our own 
 consciences ; that He may enter into the temple 
 of our own hearts ; that He may sit at our fire- 
 side; that He may talk with us as a friend 
 talks with a friend, face to face ; that we may 
 know Him as one knows an intimate compan- 
 ion ; that He may be to us " closer than breath- 
 ing, nearer than hands and feet ; " that He may 
 come to be " not so far as even to be near ; " 
 that He may be one with us and we one with 
 Him, as Christ was one with the Father. And 
 this revelation of Himself which God has been 
 carrying on from the beginning of creation 
 
THE PLACE OF CHRIST IN EVOLUTION 79 
 
 down to the present time will not be consum- 
 mated until He has reared out of these sons of 
 clay children of God like to the Christ, not 
 only in the walk and the outer life and circum- 
 stance, but in this, that God is in them and 
 they in God, in one sweet, sacred, perfect fellow- 
 ship. 
 
 7 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 REDEMPTION BY EVOLUTION 
 
 What is redemption? What do we mean 
 by this word which has come now to be a theo- 
 logical word, but in its original was not ? Of 
 course it is a figure. Practically all theological 
 words are figures. They are metaphors. Re- 
 demption is a figure derived from captivity. 
 A man is captured by brigands in Italy. He is 
 carried off into the mountains and kept there. 
 Messages are sent to his friends ; they must 
 raise a purse of money and send to the bri- 
 gands ; if they do not, the man will be kept a 
 captive there, or he will be put to death. The 
 friends raise money and ransom or redeem the 
 captive from the brigands and set him free, and 
 then he returns to his home and his friends 
 again. He has been bought with a price ; he 
 has been redeemed. This figure has been em- 
 ployed by the Bible to illustrate one phase of 
 " God's way of doing things." God redeems 
 the human race. The question whether the 
 payment of a price, the rendering of a sacrifice, 
 
REDEMPTION BY EVOLUTION 81 
 
 is consistent with evolution, is a question to be 
 considered hereafter. In this chapter I simply 
 wish to lay open before the reader the evolu- 
 tionary conception of redemption. The ques- 
 tion to be considered is not, Is the doctrine of 
 redemption, as stated in the New Testament, 
 a scientific doctrine? for the Bible does not 
 deal with science. The Bible is a book written, 
 for the most part, by poets and prophets, and 
 the very word redemption is a poetic figure. 
 The question is whether, in an evolutionary 
 conception of life, as a growth, there is anything 
 that justifies this figure, any analogue in that 
 life, anything to which that figure may legiti- 
 mately and properly be applied. 
 
 In the Biblical representations there are three 
 kinds of brigands from which we are redeemed. 
 We are said to be redeemed from the flesh, or 
 the body, or the sinful flesh ; we are said to be 
 redeemed from our iniquities or transgressions ; 
 and we are said to be redeemed from the hand 
 of our enemies. Is there anything in evolution, 
 anything in the gradual development of man 
 by regular processes from lower to higher stages 
 of moral development, by forces resident within 
 the men themselves, that justifies the figure of 
 redemption from the body, from iniquity, from 
 enemies ? 
 
 Evolution believes that man is emerging from 
 
82 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 an animal condition. The body is the animal 
 out of which he is eventually to be developed. 
 The animal still clings to him. It is at once 
 a help and a hindrance. It is a help to his 
 spiritual development because it is a hindrance, 
 and because the spiritual development comes by 
 battle, and in no other way. There is no pos- 
 sible way by which a man can acquire temper- 
 ance unless he has appetites to be subdued ; no 
 way by which he can acquire self-control, unless 
 he has animal passions to be controlled ; no way 
 by which he can acquire courage, unless he has 
 timidity to be overcome. There must be the 
 temptation within as well as the moral nature 
 within, or the moral nature cannot be developed, 
 for it is developed only by conflict with the 
 temptation. First of all, then, man is an emer- 
 ging and developing being, drawn out from, 
 lifted up from, a lower animal condition. He 
 is in battle with his own body. He is like the 
 butterfly emerging from the chrysalis ; like the 
 bird pecking its way out of the shell ; like 
 the seed breaking its husk and emerging from 
 the ground. The seed is in captivity to the 
 ground, and must be emancipated ; the bird 
 is in captivity to the shell, and must be freed 
 from its imprisonment ; the insect is in captivity 
 to the chrysalis, and must break from its prison- 
 house. And as the plant is not a plant until it 
 
REDEMPTION BY EVOLUTION 83 
 
 has broken away from the soil and come into 
 the sunlight, as the bird is not a bird until it 
 has broken out of the shell and come into the 
 air, as the butterfly is not a butterfly until it has 
 escaped from the chrysalis, so not until the man 
 has broken away from the animal and come out 
 of it and conquered it and subdued it is he truly 
 a man. The evolution of the spirit is itself 
 redemption from the flesh. 
 
 This redemption is like evolutiou, first, in that 
 it can be accomplished only by a power working 
 within. It is not by asceticism ; not by starving 
 the body ; not by making it a poorer, a weaker, 
 a feebler body ; not by less body, but by a 
 stronger spiritual nature. The power that is to 
 redeem him must be a power working within, 
 not without. The bird must peck its own way 
 through the shell ; the seed must break its own 
 way through the soil ; the butterfly must push 
 its own way through the chrysalis. If you 
 break the shell before the bird is ready to be 
 hatched, it will be but a dead bird. So the soul 
 must have within itself the power of its own 
 deliverance. It is Christ in us who is the hope 
 of our glory. 
 
 We are redeemed also, according to Scrip- 
 ture, from our transgressions and our sins. We 
 have inherited them from the past ; or we have 
 taken them upon ourselves by our own habits ; 
 
84 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 we have surrendered ourselves to bondage. And 
 now we are struggling to escape from this cap- 
 tivity. We must be redeemed from it ; must 
 be set free ; and we must be set free from this 
 sin by a power within ourselves. We continu- 
 ally try some easier and shorter way, and never 
 succeed. We think if we can only take the 
 temptation away from men, men will be virtu- 
 ous. We are mistaken. Men are made virtu- 
 ous by confronting temptation. The mother 
 who tries to keep her child away from all temp- 
 tation simply prepares the boy for a terrible fall 
 when he gets old enough to leave the home. It 
 is not by taking away the bonds, it is by giving 
 strength to the man that he may break the 
 bonds, that he is redeemed. Every man is like 
 a Samson bound by his enemies, and he must 
 acquire the strength within himself to break 
 them. God does not break them, He gives us 
 strength to break them. He does not set free 
 this man, caught by brigands, and leave him in 
 the Alps to be caught by some other brigands. 
 He puts in his hand a musket, and says to him, 
 " Fight your way to liberty." The power of re- 
 demption is the power of God in the soul. The 
 evolutionary conception of religion differs from 
 the old theology radically in this respect. The 
 old theology — not, indeed, all old theologians, 
 for the so-called new theology is, as Dr. A. V. 
 
REDEMPTION BY EVOLUTION 85 
 
 G. Allen has clearly shown, as old as the old 
 theology ; but what is currently called the old 
 theology — regarded redemption as something 
 done for man in heaven outside of him; the 
 new or evolutionary theology regards redemp- 
 tion as something done for man within him. 
 The one is what philosophers call objective ; 
 the other is what philosophers call subjective. 
 Redemption is wrought for man by the spirit of 
 God in man, making a man of him and giving 
 him power to be master over himself. The con- 
 trol wrought by redemption is self control. 
 
 We are redeemed, in the third place, from 
 our enemies. For we are in an enemy's country. 
 That which binds us is not merely the animal 
 from which we are emerging, not merely the 
 temptations which we have taken upon ourselves 
 by our own habits or which have been imposed 
 upon us by our inheritance, but our companions 
 and the life that is about us. And this redemp- 
 tion also must be a power working within. 
 How shall the city and the state and the nation 
 be redeemed from corrupt politicians? Can 
 any foreign forces do it? Can any czar, any 
 emperor, any army from without ? It is only 
 by a power working from within. If our great 
 cities cannot redeem themselves from corrupt 
 politicians, then their fate is sealed. For, in 
 the very nature of the case, it is manhood that 
 
86 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 is wanted, and manhood is not accomplished by 
 striking the chains from men's wrists and leav- 
 ing them to be reduced to bondage again by 
 the same evil forces that enslaved them before. 
 "We have not redeemed the African race when 
 we have signed the emancipation proclamation ; 
 we must follow it up with educative and reli- 
 gious influences, with the school and the church. 
 It is not enough to give the negro the ballot ; 
 he must be made a man ; out of the manhood 
 will grow citizenship. 
 
 This is characteristic of the teaching of Christ 
 from first to last ; the life must work from within 
 outward, not from without inward. It is only 
 as God works in us to will and to do of His good 
 pleasure that we are saved; only as the indi- 
 vidual or society takes into itself the vital forces 
 that either is endued with a new life. No trans- 
 action wrought in heaven will redeem either 
 the race or the individual. Whatever is planned 
 in heaven must be wrought out in the soul of 
 man. The sun can never bring a bud to blos- 
 som or a seed to growth, except as the rays of 
 the sun come to the earth and put the life into 
 the seed and into the bud. This is one truth, 
 then, involved in the doctrine of redemption by 
 evolution : that the redemptive force is a force 
 within. It is God in humanity; God in the 
 individual soul; God intoning the conscience, 
 
REDEMPTION BY EVOLUTION 87 
 
 clarifying the faith, strengthening the will, mak- 
 ing the man ; and only as the man receives God 
 into himself can he be redeemed. 
 
 The second element in the doctrine of evo- 
 lution is that it is a development from a lower 
 to a higher stage. Evolution never goes back- 
 ward. The doctrine of evolution recognizes 
 conditions in which there is no growth; but 
 that is called arrested development. It recog- 
 nizes conditions in which there is a falling back 
 into the conditions out of which emergence has 
 taken place ; but that is called degeneracy. 
 Both arrested development and degeneracy are 
 recognized by the evolutionist, but they are not 
 parts of, they are hindrances to evolution. 
 Evolution is not restoration. 
 
 John Milton, having told the story of the 
 fall in "Paradise Lost," wrote "Paradise Ke- 
 gained," and thus he interpreted the doctrine 
 of redemption : — 
 
 " I, who erewhile the happy garden sang 
 By one man's disobedience lost, now sing 
 Recovered paradise to all mankind, 
 
 And Eden raised in the waste wilderness. ,, 
 
 To some extent, at least, the old theology so con- 
 ceived redemption. Man sinned and fell in 
 Eden. Eedemption is to recover him and put 
 him back into the condition from which he fell. 
 
88 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 Evolution cannot be reconciled with that theory ; 
 with the hypothesis that man was perfect, that 
 he fell, and that he is to be put back into the 
 perfect condition from which he fell. That is 
 not evolutionary. Nor can I reconcile it with 
 the Bible. I cannot find from cover to cover in 
 the Bible the suggestion that man is to be put 
 back again, that he is to be restored to Eden. 
 
 The Bible always anticipates something 
 higher, larger, nobler than was ever known in 
 the past. When Abraham goes out of the land 
 of paganism to a land he knows not what, he 
 is not called back to Eden. When Moses calls 
 the children of Israel out of the land of Goshen 
 into the Promised Land, it is to a new land 
 that is to be opened up to them ; their looking 
 back is continually reprobated and condemned. 
 When the exiles are called out of Babylon, it is 
 not with any conception that the old condition 
 of things is to be restored ; it is to a new and 
 larger glory, when " Gentiles shall come to thy 
 light, and the nations to thy rising." When 
 Christ comes, He never bids His disciples look 
 back for the golden age. He tells them of a 
 kingdom to come, not of a kingdom that has 
 been. He tells them that greater works than 
 He has done, His disciples shall do ; the future 
 has more for them than the past. Paul never 
 suggests that the race is to go back to Eden, to 
 
REDEMPTION BY EVOLUTION 89 
 
 Isaiah, to David, to Moses. His call is always 
 toward a nobler future. Finally, the last book 
 of the Bible is a prophetic book ; the garden it 
 portrays is not the garden of Eden. In this 
 garden of the Apocalypse the very leaves are 
 for the healing of the nations, and the fruit 
 is of many kinds, yielded every month, and all 
 freely to be plucked ; and alongside this garden is 
 the great city, the New Jerusalem, the fruit 
 of centuries of Christian civilization. 1 
 
 The redemption, then, by evolution corre- 
 sponds with the redemption described in the 
 Bible. Neither proposes to restore the past; 
 both propose to push forward to the future. 
 We cannot go back politically. It is idle for 
 Carlyle and Euskin to lament the days of feud- 
 alism and call on us to go back to hero-worship. 
 Out of the past a better present has been evolved, 
 and out of the present a nobler future is to be 
 evolved. We cannot go back politically to Jef- 
 ferson's democracy, or Hamilton's conservatism. 
 If Hamilton were here to-day, he would not be 
 the Hamilton he once was. If Jefferson were 
 here to-day, he would not be the Jefferson he 
 once was. The future has more for this country 
 than the past ever had, and the nation must press 
 forward to the future, not turn lamentingly back 
 to the past. 
 
 1 See Evolution of Christianity, chap. i. pp. 13-20. 
 
90 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 We cannot go back intellectually. We are 
 not to go back to the creeds of the past ; not to 
 the sixteenth century, not to the fourth century. 
 God has been keeping his children at school for 
 eighteen centuries. They ought to know more 
 after eighteen centuries of education than they 
 did in the first century. And they do. We are 
 more competent to create a system of theology 
 to-day than they were who made the Westmin- 
 ster Confession of Faith ; more competent than 
 they were who made the Nicene Creed. Many 
 are they who lament the childlike faith of the 
 past. We never can have the childlike faith of 
 the past, and we are not to wish for it. We are 
 to wish for the manhood faith of the future ; not 
 the unshaken faith of the babe, — the shaken 
 faith of the man ; not the little oakling which is 
 putting its leaves above the ground, — the great 
 strong oak that has breasted the storms and run 
 its roots down deep, because the storm has beat 
 upon it. We ought to be more devout because 
 of Eobert Ingersoll. Not because he is an edu- 
 cator in devotion, but because the shaken faith 
 should be stronger than the unshaken, and we 
 should have our roots so laying hold of God 
 Almighty that blasts of tempestuous doubt 
 shall only make them take a stronger hold. 
 
 As organically and socially and intellectually, 
 so spiritually we are to move forward. Progress 
 
REDEMPTION BY EVOLUTION 91 
 
 is not toward innocence. Innocence once lost 
 cannot be recovered. Spiritual progress is from 
 innocence through temptation to virtue. The 
 struggle is essential to the victory, and the vic- 
 tory lies in the future. Out of the condition of 
 innocence, when we had not sinned because we 
 had not been tempted, we are carried by success- 
 ive stages forward, if we are true to ourselves, 
 to our education, and to our opportunity, to the 
 manhood which masters temptation and is by it 
 made strong. 
 
 What is true of the state, the Church, the 
 individual, is true of the race. Men ask con- 
 cerning the world, " Is it worse, or better? " It 
 is both. The drunkenness of to-day, since the 
 invention of distilled liquors, is worse than the 
 drunkenness in ancient Rome. They did not 
 know delirium tremens, and we do. When men 
 learned to write, they acquired a new method of 
 fraud, — forgery. With banks and credit sys- 
 tems came in the possibility of defalcation ; with 
 science, explosives and dynamite. The public 
 school makes some men better, some men worse. 
 Power used for virtue is good, used for vice is 
 evil, — and development is power. The temp- 
 tations of life are far greater in this nineteenth 
 century than they were in the sixteenth or the 
 first. The temptations the adult man has to 
 meet with in society, in business, in the family, 
 
92 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 are far greater than the temptations which as- 
 sailed him when a little child four or five years 
 old, protected by his mother. The passage of 
 life is from innocence, through temptation, to 
 virtue, and every new virtue acquired is only 
 preliminary to a new battle to be begun. 
 y This is redemption, — the development of the 
 whole man. In it we come, through all the con- 
 flict of life, unto a perfect manhood in Christ 
 Jesus, into clearness of vision, largeness of know- 
 ledge, strength of will. Redemption makes the 
 very enemies of spiritual life instruments of 
 spiritual life. Eedeemed, we become conquer- 
 ors ; nor is that all : " more than conquerors." 
 More than a conqueror ? How is that possible ? 
 Napoleon, landing on the shores of France from 
 Elba, met successive detachments of Bourbon 
 troops sent out to capture him, and detachment 
 after detachment, as it came to him, swept 
 round to his rear and swelled his ranks to give 
 him victory. He was more than conqueror. 
 This is what redemption, or evolution, — one 
 term is theological, the other is scientific, — does 
 for man. In redemption, in spiritual evolution, 
 the machine and the corrupt politicians become 
 the instruments of our victory ; the purer state 
 is achieved by the battle with corrupt forces. 
 The temptations that assail us become forces for 
 the development of our manhood ; the chisel that 
 
u- 
 
 REDEMPTION BY EVOLUTION 93 
 
 strikes against us perfects the image of the Christ 
 in us. The, cohorts of evil are converted into 
 the recruits of virtue, and by temptation we con- 
 quer a virtue that is immeasurably sublimer than 
 innocence. 
 
CHAPTER Vn 
 
 EVOLUTION AND SACRIFICE 
 
 Why, in a world made and ruled by a benefi- 
 cent being, should there be suffering, — not acci- 
 dental, incidental, occasional, but wrought into 
 the very woof of life ? The first sound of the 
 babe is a cry ; the last sound of the dying man 
 is, ordinarily, a sigh or groan ; and from the 
 cradle to the grave the sad refrain of sorrow 
 sounds. Neither the merry music of pleasure, 
 the clatter of industry, nor the noise of battle 
 can effectually drown it. We can understand 
 some aspects of this mystery. Why sin should 
 bring with it penalty we can understand ; why 
 imperfection should require suffering as a disci- 
 pline for its removal we can understand. But 
 the innocent suffer more than the guilty : the 
 mother more than the wayward son ; the hero on 
 the battlefield laying down his life for the na- 
 tion, or suffering racking pain in the hospital, 
 more than the ambitious politician who provoked 
 the war; the martyr offering his life for the 
 Church more than the bigot who fires the fagots. 
 
EVOLUTION AND SACRIFICE 95 
 
 How is this ? Why should innocence suffer as 
 well as guilt — often more ? 
 
 We might more easily understand this if suf- 
 fering belonged only to the lower forms of life, 
 and we gradually emerged from it. But, on the 
 contrary, the lowest forms of life suffer the least ; 
 the higher we rise in life the keener is the an- 
 guish, the bitterer the pain. This is the problem 
 we are to consider. I do not attempt to solve 
 this problem. I only attempt to show that not 
 only suffering, but vicarious suffering, the suffer- 
 ing of the innocent for the guilty, is an essential 
 element in the process of growth. It is not 
 peculiar to religion, it is a part of the mystery 
 of life. I do not seek to explain the problem of 
 suffering, I seek simply to correlate it with the 
 universal mystery. 
 
 Darwinism is not evolution, though it is often 
 in popular imagination confounded with evolu- 
 tion. Darwinism stands for the doctrine that 
 the progress of life has been due to a struggle 
 for existence in which the fittest have survived 
 and the unfittest have perished. I do not affirm 
 that this is a complete epitome of Darwin's 
 teaching. It is immaterial for the purpose of 
 this chapter whether it is so or not. It is for 
 this doctrine of struggle for existence and sur- 
 vival of the fittest that the word Darwinism 
 stands in popular language ; and evolution stands 
 for very much more. 
 
96 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 " Darwinism," says the " Century Dictionary," 
 "is in general the theory that all forms of 
 living organisms, including man, have been de- 
 rived or evolved by descent, with modification 
 or variation, from a few primitive forms of life 
 or from one, during the struggle for existence 
 of individual organisms, which results, through 
 natural selection, in the survival of those least 
 exposed, by reason of their organization or situ- 
 ation, to destruction. It is not to be confounded 
 with the general views of the development or 
 evolution of the visible order of nature which 
 have been entertained by philosophers from the 
 earliest times." 
 
 I am not trying in this volume to show that 
 Christianity can be harmonized with Darwinism. 
 If Darwinism be accepted by any as a com- 
 plete solution of the process of life, it is not so 
 accepted by the great evolutionists. It is only 
 one contribution to the philosophical conception 
 of the processes of life. The doctrine that strug- 
 gle for existence and the survival of the fittest 
 is an epitome of life, that all animate nature is 
 wrestling, every fellow with his fellow, and that 
 every life depends on the destruction of some 
 other life, slain in the struggle by the selfishness 
 of the victor, is a hard and cruel view of life, and 
 it is not the view of the great evolutionists. Mr. 
 Huxley, in his notable address on "Evolution 
 
EVOLUTION AND SACRIFICE 97 
 
 and Ethics," distinctly disavows and repudiates 
 it. He maintains that when life has passed 
 beyond a certain imaginary line, when we have 
 reached that state of existence in which the 
 moral law begins to operate, then this struggle 
 for existence and survival of the fittest will no 
 longer develop the higher life, and a new force 
 must and does enter. He says : — 
 
 "As I have already urged, the practice of 
 that which is ethically best — what we call good- 
 ness or virtue — involves a course of conduct 
 which in all respects is opposed to that which 
 leads to success in the cosmic struggle for exist- 
 ence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it de- 
 mands self-restraint ; in place of thrusting aside, 
 or treading down, all competitors, it requires 
 that the individual shall not merely respect but 
 shall help his fellows; its influence is directed 
 not so much to the survival of the fittest as to 
 the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It 
 repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence. 
 It demands that each man who enters into the 
 enjoyment of the advantages of a polity shall 
 be mindful of his debt to those who have labo- 
 riously constructed it, and shall take heed that 
 no act of his weakens the fabric in which he has 
 been permitted to live. Laws and moral pre- 
 cepts are directed to the end of curbing the 
 cosmic process and reminding the individual of 
 
98 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 his duty to the community, to the protection and 
 influence of which he owes, if not existence 
 itself, at least the life of something better than 
 the brutal savage." 1 
 
 That is the utterance of one of the most famous 
 evolutionists. Evolution is not the theory that 
 struggle for existence and the survival of the fit- 
 test is the whole history of life. There is another 
 and at least equally important element. The 
 great contribution which Mr. Drummond has 
 made to the theory of evolution is in carrying this 
 thought of Mr. Huxley further back in history. 
 In the " Ascent of Man " he has shown that there 
 is another struggle than the struggle for exist- 
 ence, which dates from the very beginning of 
 creation ; that there are two struggles going on 
 contemporaneously, — the struggle for others, as 
 he rightly calls it, and the struggle for self ; and 
 that development of life is due to the combined 
 struggle, — the selfish and the unselfish, the 
 struggle for self and the struggle for others than 
 self. It is true that he was not the first to do 
 this. Herbert Spencer had shown that altruism 
 runs far back in human history. But Mr. 
 Drummond has shown this with greater clear- 
 ness of statement, beauty of illustration, warmth 
 of feeling, and more intellectual emphasis than 
 any predecessor. " Creation," says Mr. Drum- 
 
 1 Evolution and Ethics ; Collected Essays, vol. ix. p. 81. 
 
EVOLUTION AND SACRIFICE 99 
 
 mond, " is a drama, and no drama was ever put 
 upon the stage with only one actor. The strug- 
 gle for life is the ' Villain ' of the piece no 
 more ; and, like the * Villain ' in the play, its 
 chief function is to reaot upon other players 
 for higher ends. There is, in point of fact, a 
 second factor which we might venture to call 
 the Struggle for the Life of Others, which plays 
 an equally prominent part. Even in the early 
 stages of development its contribution is as 
 real, while in the world's later progress — un- 
 der the name of Altruism — it assumes a sov- 
 ereignty before which the earlier struggle sinks 
 into insignificance." 1 
 
 Evolution, then, involves these two funda- 
 mental ideas : Struggle for Self, and Struggle 
 for Others ; Struggle for Self in all the long 
 line of development, from the first beginnings 
 of endeavor to maintain a mere physical exist- 
 ence up to the last supreme struggle with the 
 powers of evil, out of the very struggle with 
 which there is developed a higher moral na- 
 ture; 2 and interwoven with it Struggle for 
 Others, not introduced, as Mr. Huxley would 
 have us think, when man reaches an ethical 
 stage, but beginning with the very beginnings 
 
 1 The Ascent of Man, p. 13. Compare also Social Evolution, 
 by Benjamin Kidd, and Moral Evolution, by Professor George 
 Harris. 
 
 2 See chapter iii., " The Genesis of Sin." 
 
100 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 of life. The first beginning of organism is 
 a cell, and that cell cannot reproduce itself in 
 the first step toward growth except by parting 
 with a part of itself. The cell itself becomes 
 divided ; it gives part of its life in order that 
 by the very giving of this life there may be the 
 beginning of a growth. Evolution has its birth 
 in sacrifice. From that starting-point, when 
 the first protoplasm divides, and out of that 
 division there begins another and a larger life, 
 all the way up to the highest, life goes on by the 
 process of giving for others what belongs to self. 
 The bird does not begin in the egg, it begins in 
 the mother ; and when the bird is in the egg, 
 the mother surrenders her freedom and im- 
 prisons herself that she may brood the egg and 
 develop its life ; and the father bird becomes 
 a forager, gathering food, not primarily for 
 himself, but for the mother bird and for the 
 little unfledged birds that are to be or that have 
 come. The struggle of the bird in the forest 
 is the struggle for the birdling, — the struggle 
 of father and mother for others. As life rises 
 in the scale of being, this Struggle for Others 
 becomes at once more difficult and more appar- 
 ent. The feeblest of all the infants is the infant 
 man. The infant bird can care for itself better 
 than the infant man. The period of caretaking 
 is longer in the case of the infant man. It is 
 
EVOLUTION AND SACRIFICE 101 
 
 kept up through successive years ; first the care 
 of the mere physical well-being, then care for 
 the intellectual and moral development. The 
 child exists, not because it has struggled for 
 existence, but because from the hour of birth 
 the father and the mother have struggled for 
 the child's existence, giving their life for the 
 child. 
 
 And as this process goes on, and the child 
 comes into the intellectual and moral realm, the 
 intellectual and the moral growth depend also 
 upon a life-giving by another. Self-educated we 
 call men. No man is self-educated ; he acquires 
 his education from some one else : from pro- 
 fessional teacher, from public school, from father 
 and mother, from companions. Some one who 
 has lived before him, some one who is living at 
 his side, is ministering to his life, and pouring 
 life into him. All our schools and all processes 
 of education are founded on this fundamental 
 postulate : that the life of the individual can 
 grow only as some one else is giving life to him. 
 This is not a mere individual fact, it is a race 
 fact. No race ever develops itself without a 
 higher element coming into the race and mov- 
 ing upon it. We have tried the experiment 
 of self -development in this country. The North 
 American Indians had noble blood in them, 
 and qualities of a noble manhood. We put 
 
102 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 them into reservations ; forbade the railroad 
 to bring enterprise, the telegraph to give intelli- 
 gence, the post-office to bring the mails. With 
 the life of the nineteenth century shut out from 
 them, in our New York reservations, the In- 
 dians are to-day substantially as pagan as they 
 were a hundred and fifty years ago. 
 
 Life proceeds from life. This is apparently 
 a universal truth. Scientists are very cautious 
 about making general statements, — much more 
 cautious than theologians are, — and probably 
 no scientist will say that life never can proceed 
 except from life ; but all scientists will say this : 
 that, so far as we can discover, life never has 
 proceeded from the non-living. Always, in the 
 physical realm, in the intellectual realm, in 
 the spiritual realm, life is a gift. The secret 
 of growth, its starting-point, its very source, is 
 a struggle by one for another. 
 
 And this impartation of life, by struggle of 
 one for another, as we rise in the scale of life, 
 comes to involve self-denial, self-sacrifice. The 
 mother bird surrenders the joy of freedom 
 of flight for the greater joy of maternity. 
 The human mother who formerly enjoyed so- 
 ciety shuts herself up in the nursery with 
 no society but the babe in her arms. The 
 teacher goes down from his high estate of know- 
 ledge to link himself with the ignorant pupils 
 
EVOLUTION AND SACRIFICE 103 
 
 before him; unless he can do this, he cannot 
 teach. In this respect our colleges often make 
 great mistakes ; they look out for great scholars ; 
 but a great scholar is often not a great teacher. 
 To be a great teacher one must not only have 
 great thoughts, but great sympathy with men 
 who have not great thoughts ; he must know 
 how to come down out of himself to the pupils 
 before him, come into touch with them, and 
 pour out of his abundance into their vacuity. 
 That costs something, and in the moral and 
 spiritual realm it costs a great deal. It is 
 easy to give food ; more difficult to give intel- 
 lectual culture ; most difficult of all to give 
 moral and spiritual life. A pure woman con- 
 secrates herself to the task of giving purity 
 to women who have lost it ; does it not cost her 
 something ? Does she not hate the impurity ? 
 Does she not shrink from contact with it ? 
 Does it not revolt her, as a noisome atmosphere 
 revolts the healthful lungs ? Does she not have 
 to conquer her revulsion by the higher inspira- 
 tions of her love, that she may render this 
 service? Is it not absolutely certain that if 
 she has not that horror of impurity, has not 
 to battle in herself, has not to conquer her own 
 instinctive shrinking by her larger love, — is it 
 not certain that she can do nothing ? An un- 
 sympathetic heart cannot help a sorrowing or 
 
104 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 a sinful one ; and to sympathize is to suffer 
 with. 
 
 What has made the Church of Christ what 
 it is to-day? Our struggles? Did we face 
 the persecutions of Nero ? Did we flee from 
 the persecuting hordes in the Waldensian val- 
 leys ? Did we fight the battles with the Duke 
 of Alva on the plains of Netherlands ? Did we 
 struggle with hierarchical despotism at Worces- 
 ter and at Naseby? Did we face the cold 
 and the suffering of New England? Others 
 have struggled for us, and we have taken the 
 fruit of their struggles ; and if our posterity 
 are to have a nation worthy of their possession, 
 it will be because in us there is also some hand- 
 to-hand wrestling, some self-denial, some strug- 
 gle with the forces of corruption and evil in our 
 own time. This is the great general law which 
 Paul has expressed in the declaration, " The 
 whole creation groaneth and travaileth together 
 \ in pain until now." Vicarious sacrifice is not 
 an episode. It is the universal law of life. 
 Life comes only from life. This is the first 
 proposition. Life-giving costs the life-giver 
 something. That is the second proposition. 
 Pain is travail-pain, birth-pain ; and it is a part 
 of the divine order — that is, of the order of 
 nature — that the birth of a higher life should 
 always be through the pain of another. 
 
EVOLUTION AND SACRIFICE 105 
 
 This is the law of God, — that is, the nature 
 of God. For the laws of God are not edicts 
 promulgated ; they are the expressions of Him- 
 self ; and the law that life comes only by the 
 pouring out of life through suffering is an ex- 
 pression of the divine nature. This is the mean- 
 ing of Paul's teaching in the eighth chapter of 
 Romans : first, that it is the universal law that 
 all life is by impartation of life ; and, secondly, 
 that this is universal because it is divine ; that 
 God Himself is the great Life-giver, and gives 
 by His own suffering His life to the children of 
 men. 
 
 This, too, is what is meant by that statement 
 so dear to some and so shocking to others, — 
 that we are saved by the blood of Christ. Let 
 us try for a moment to disabuse our minds of 
 traditional opinions and see what that phrase 
 means looked at in the light of history. Is 
 U the blood of Christ " the blood which flowed 
 from Him at the crucifixion ? His was almost 
 a bloodless death ; a few drops of blood only 
 trickled from the pierced hands and feet ; for 
 the blood and water that came from the side 
 when the spear pierced it came after death, 
 when the suffering was all over. Blood, the 
 Bible itself declares, is life ; we are saved by 
 the blood of Christ when we are saved by the 
 life of Christ, — by Christ's own life imparted 
 
106 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 to us, by Christ's life transmitted; and by 
 Christ's life transmitted, as life alone can be 
 transmitted, through the gateway of pain and 
 suffering. 1 The suffering of Jesus Christ was 
 not a single episode, — one short hour, one short 
 three years : the suffering of Jesus Christ was 
 the revelation of the eternal fact that God is 
 from eternity the Life-giver, and that giving 
 life costs God something, as it costs us some- 
 thing. 
 
 Evolution, then, certainly does teach that to 
 give life costs something; that the secret of 
 growth is the impartation of life; and this is 
 what the Bible means by what we call vicarious 
 sacrifice. I must either run the hazard of start- 
 ling the faith and shocking the sensibilities of 
 some, or else the hazard of speaking vaguely, 
 indefinitely, unclearly, and uncandidly, which 
 no teacher ever has a right deliberately to do. 
 I was educated to believe in what is known as 
 the governmental theory of the atonement. I 
 was brought up to believe that God had pro- 
 
 1 " The blood of Christ means the inmost essence of charac- 
 ter, the self of his self. . . . The blood of Christ, said Igna- 
 tius of Antioch, is love or charity. What is the blood of 
 Christ ? asked Livingstone of his own solitary soul in the 
 last months of his African wanderings. It is Himself. It is 
 the inherent and everlasting mercy of God made apparent to 
 human eyes and ears." (Condensed from Dean Stanley's 
 Christian Institutions, chapter vi.) 
 
EVOLUTION AND SACRIFICE 107 
 
 nounced certain judgments against sinful hu- 
 manity, that a penalty was due for our misdeeds, 
 that Jesus Christ came to the earth and suffered 
 the penalty in order that God might take the 
 penalty off from us and let us go. I not only 
 was brought up to believe it, but I did believe 
 it in the early years of my ministry. I believe 
 it no longer. It is not in consonance with the 
 teaching either of Scripture or of life. In life 
 punishment is not taken from the guilty and put 
 upon the innocent. The father does not put the 
 penalty upon the mother in order that he may 
 forgive the boy. The governor does not put 
 the penalty upon some innocent person in order 
 that he may sign a pardon for the guilty person. 
 There is nothing akin to this conception of pen- 
 alty and pardon in life. Nor is it to be found 
 in the teaching of Scripture. Scripture doc- 
 trine need not always be stated in Scripture 
 phraseology, but a doctrine which for its state- 
 ment must use words not to be found in the 
 Scripture may safely be looked upon with sus- 
 picion. We are asked to affirm a doctrine of 
 expiation. The word expiation does not occur 
 in the New Testament. We are asked to affirm 
 our belief in vicarious suffering. The word 
 vicarious does not occur in the New Testament. 
 We are asked to affirm that Christ was a sub- 
 stitute for man. The words substitute and sub- 
 
108 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 stitution do not occur in the New Testament. 
 We are asked to affirm our belief in atonement. 
 The word atonement does not occur in the New 
 Testament. It is to be found in only one place 
 in the Old Version, and in the New Version it 
 has been rendered, as it should be, " reconcili- 
 ation," as it is throughout the New Testament 
 where the same Greek word occurs. 
 
 There is no authority in Scripture for the 
 doctrine that God puts the penalty due to a 
 guilty person upon an innocent one. We are 
 saved by the blood of Christ, because we are 
 saved by the life of Christ poured into our life ; 
 saved by the sacrifice of Christ, because there is 
 no way in which life can be ministered to with- 
 out the seeming sacrifice of another life ; saved 
 by the suffering of Christ, because there is no 
 way in which, from the lowest to the highest, 
 including God Himself, one can minister to the 
 life of another in the moral and spiritual realm 
 without suffering. I cannot find anywhere in 
 the Old Testament the idea of sacrifice coupled 
 with the idea of penalty ; it is always cou- 
 pled with purification. The house is corrupted 
 by leprosy : a sacrifice is offered. Why ? To 
 purify the home. The priest must offer a sac- 
 rifice before he goes into the Holy of Holies. 
 Why? To purify himself and make himself 
 fit to enter into the sacred place. The Great 
 
EVOLUTION AND SACRIFICE 109 
 
 Day of Atonement comes ; two goats are led 
 out as nearly alike as possible ; a red cord is 
 tied around the horns of one to represent the 
 sins of the people ; the sins are laid upon the 
 head of that goat by the priest in a prayer of 
 confession ; then that goat is led off into the 
 wilderness and seen no more, and the twin goat 
 is slain. What is laid on the head of the scape- 
 goat ? Punishment ? No ! not the punishment, 
 — the sins of the people are carried away ; the 
 people are purified by sacrifice. Turn from the 
 Law to the Prophets, and to the one chapter of 
 the one prophet which has more to say of Christ 
 as the sacrifice for sin than all other chapters 
 of all other prophets, — the fifty-third chapter 
 of Isaiah. Not from beginning to end of this 
 chapter is there a suggestion of deliverance from 
 penalty by the suffering servant of the Lord ; 
 he brings healing, cure, deliverance from sin. 
 " With his stripes we are healed." " The Lord 
 hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." 
 
 If we turn from the Old Testament to the 
 New Testament, we find the same truth there. 
 Nowhere in the New Testament is the sacrifice of 
 Christ coupled with a statement of the removal 
 of punishment, — but always with the trans- 
 mission of life or the removal of sin. He is the 
 Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the 
 world. He is called Jesus because He saves his 
 
110 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 people from their sins. His is the blood of the 
 New Testament, which is shed for many for the 
 remission of sins. The flesh which He gives, He 
 gives for the life of the world. The blood of 
 Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin. Whether 
 we look at the Old Testament types and figures 
 in sacrifice or at the New Testament's direct 
 teachings concerning the sufferings of Christ, 
 the lesson is always the same, — the suffering 
 of Christ is for purification, not merely, not 
 chiefly, perhaps not at all, for the removal of 
 penalty. 
 
 And surely, if there be any noble instinct in 
 us, any divine aspiration, any pure desire, it 
 cannot be satisfied by the mere statement that 
 punishment will be taken away. How often has 
 it happened in human history that the man who 
 has sinned has said, " I wish to be punished ; I 
 wish to bear the penalty." It is not the removal 
 of the penalty, it is the removal of the sin, hu- 
 manity needs ; the animalism taken out, a new 
 and higher nature made master and conqueror. 
 It is life, not ease; righteousness, not pearly 
 gates and golden streets. If we be men and 
 women, we do not so much care to be in heaven 
 as to have heaven in us. 
 
 To sum all up in a few words of restatement : 
 life comes only as some one is willing to give 
 his life ; and life can be given to the sinful only 
 
EVOLUTION AND SACRIFICE 111 
 
 through pain and suffering. The cross of Christ 
 is like a window through which the soul looking 
 sees the eternal facts : the Lamb slain from the 
 foundation of the world, God bearing the sins 
 and sufferings of His children through all ages, 
 until He shall bear them away, pouring out His 
 life-blood through all the ages, until, pouring it 
 into these our poisoned veins, He shall have 
 cleansed them of their impurity, filled them with 
 a new life-current, and made us worthy to be 
 called children of God. As I have passed from 
 that earlier, and, as it seems to me, cruder and 
 more artificial conception, to this later, and, as 
 it seems to me, profounder conception, the cross 
 of Christ has come to mean not less but more ; 
 and as I stand before it and look up into the 
 eyes of Him who hangs upon it, I see in Him 
 not merely one who has borne scourging for my 
 sake, but one who interprets the consummate 
 fact of human life, — suffering for others, in 
 which I now see a prophecy of the awful yet 
 splendid divine fact of God's infinite suffering 
 love. For in that cross the Crucified discloses 
 the eternal love of the Father, and shows Him 
 the Life-giver to us, His children, through the 
 giving of His own life for us and our salvation. 
 
CHAPTER VIH 
 
 EVOLUTION AND PROPITIATION 
 
 We have seen that the idea of evolution in- 
 volves the idea of struggle. There is first a 
 " struggle for existence," and, as the result of 
 this struggle, a survival of the fittest and a 
 growth toward that which is fit to survive. An 
 analogous struggle is seen in the higher realms 
 of life. Knowledge of the truth, clearness of 
 apprehension and tenacity of grasp upon it, are 
 developed by struggle with error. Revelation 
 is not a divine contrivance for saving men from 
 struggle, but a divine incitement to and encour- 
 agement in struggle ! Virtue is developed by 
 struggle with temptation. Grace is not an easy 
 bestowment of virtue on an unstruggling crea- 
 ture, but such aid as is necessary to inspire the 
 courage of hope and give assurance of victory. 
 But struggle is for others as well as for self ; 
 the struggle of love as well as of self-interest ; 
 the struggle of parents for their offspring, of 
 reformers for the State, of martyrs for the 
 Church. And these and kindred struggles all 
 
EVOLUTION AND PROPITIATION 113 
 
 point to and are prophetic of the service and 
 the sacrifice of the Son of God. For this strug- 
 gle of love is divine. It belongs not to the in- 
 firmity of humanity, but is an essential element 
 in that process of evolution which is God's way 
 of doing things. It is the object of this chapter 
 to make clear the further truth that this strug- 
 gle for others necessarily includes a struggle in 
 one's self ; that as in the redeemed there is a 
 struggle within between the temptation and the 
 aspiration, victory in which is virtue, so there is 
 in every redeemer a struggle between hatred for 
 the sin and pity for the tempted ; and that this 
 struggle also is not an incident of human weak- 
 ness, but is essential in the work of redemption ; 
 so that without this inward struggle no redemp- 
 tion would be possible. 
 
 If we trace the history of the moral and spir- 
 itual development of the race, we find first and 
 lowest that state of mind in which sin is looked 
 upon with allowance, indifference, unconcern. 
 Men laugh at sin, or even honor it. Their gods 
 are lawless and wicked. The gods of classic 
 Greece and Rome were drunken, hateful, licen- 
 tious, thieving, lying gods. What was said by 
 Isaiah of the Israelitish nation might have been 
 said of them : they were full of iniquity from 
 the crown of the head to the sole of the foot. 
 The Psalmist recognizes this low conception of 
 
114 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 divinity, when in one of the Psalms he says, 
 " Yon thought that God was altogether such an 
 one as you are." There are in all our great 
 cities men and even women who are living in 
 this moral state, in whom sin awakens no re- 
 morse, to whom the drunkard is only an object 
 of amusement, to whom licentiousness is matter 
 of jest if not of admiration. There have been 
 epochs in human history characterized by this 
 moral state, even late in the Christian era. The 
 literature of England in the reign of Charles 
 the Second is full of illustrations of this death 
 in life. 
 
 The first step out of this condition of in- 
 difference to sin is the state of wrath and in- 
 dignation against it. This indignation is almost 
 always aroused, in the first instance, by sins 
 which impinge upon the individual himself. 
 False witness may slander my neighbor, and I 
 bear it with unexemplary patience; but if he 
 slanders me, I am wrathful. For in the begin- 
 ning nothing awakens conscience but self-love. 
 A man may rob my neighbor, and I shall not 
 be greatly troubled ; but let him rob me, and I 
 am full of indignation, because at first the moral 
 nature is stirred only by selfishness. Recent his- 
 tory has afforded a striking illustration of this 
 truth. The Armenians have been massacred 
 by the Turks, the Greeks have risen in a futile 
 
EVOLUTION AND PROPITIATION 115 
 
 revolt against the Turks. The Anglo-Saxon 
 race has looked on with some impatience, but 
 with unexemplary equability of temper. Had 
 the victims of Turkish malevolence been an 
 Anglo-Saxon people, England would have been 
 aflame with uncontrollable indignation. 
 
 But gradually we grow out of this lower state, 
 in which only self-interest can arouse effectual 
 indignation against wrong. "We begin to feel 
 wrath at wrong-doing which does not affect our 
 interests. We begin to organize against the 
 sins that harm others than ourselves. We feel 
 wrath and indignation toward a man who has 
 done any wickedness. That is a bad state of 
 society in which a mob executes the death sen- 
 tence on assassins ; but that is a worse state of 
 society in which crime goes unpunished and 
 there is no flambent wrath in the community 
 against iniquity. Mob law is not to be defended, 
 but mob law is the expression of a conscience not 
 yet dead ; and where there is no wrath, and 
 iniquity goes unchastised of justice, then society 
 has gone back into animalism. Thus, out of 
 that state of society which characterized Rome 
 in the first century, in which flagrant iniquity 
 went unpunished, emerges that state of society 
 which existed in the Middle Ages, in which the 
 consciences of men were aroused in wrath against 
 iniquity, and against those forms of iniquity that 
 
116 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 did not directly injure those who were the aven- 
 gers. It is true that the cruelties of the Inqui- 
 sition rivaled the cruelties of Nero. But they 
 were not as immoral. The conscience that flames 
 out against men, not for selfish reasons, but be- 
 cause it believes men have blasphemed the name 
 of God, indicates a better moral state than that 
 in which vengeance is aroused only by personal 
 selfishness or ambition. The wrath of conscience 
 is as cruel a wrath as that of covetousness, but 
 it is not so immoral nor so degrading. 
 
 As society is educated under the teaching of 
 God's Gospel, it passes by a natural reaction 
 from hatred of sin into simple compassion and 
 pity. Then we pick the drunkard out of the 
 gutter, and coddle him and set him up on the 
 platform to be straightway our teacher ; for we 
 have now no sense of wrath against inordinate 
 appetite. We are overwhelmed with pity for 
 the murderer, with no restraining sense of jus- 
 tice against him, and send him gifts, — broiled 
 chicken and costly flowers, — and parade his 
 name in the newspapers almost as a hero to be 
 worshiped. We say that we are charitable. In 
 fact we have forgotten that which is the basis of 
 all moral character, — to abhor that which is 
 evil. As the first century represented the state 
 of indifference to iniquity, as the Middle Ages 
 represented the state of wrath against iniquity, 
 
EVOLUTION AND PROPITIATION 111 
 
 so this nineteenth century often represents mor- 
 bid sentiments of pity. "We are not so much 
 concerned with the drunkard as with his head- 
 ache and his misery. We are not so much 
 troubled by covetousness as by poverty, and are 
 more eager to form anti-poverty societies than 
 anti-covetous societies. It is the evil which sins 
 bring upon men that brings sorrow to our hearts 
 rather than sin itself. Nor shall we come into 
 a moral state which is worthy of the children of 
 God until we have taken these two factors, 
 wrath against sin and pity because of sin, and 
 found a way to unite them in one common expe- 
 rience. Not merely wrath against sin and pity 
 for the sinner. No woman who is pure but 
 must have felt a sense of revulsion from the im- 
 pure woman. No man who is perfectly truthful 
 but must have felt a sense of loathing for a liar. 
 No man who is honest but must have felt a 
 sense of antagonism, hate, wrath, indignation — 
 call it what you will, there are no words adequate 
 to express it — for the dishonest man. And yet 
 with this sense of indignation against that 
 which is iniquitous and shameful, there is also 
 in the heart a great pity for the sinful man. 
 We both hate him and sorrow for him ; and out 
 of these two combined experiences there grows 
 mercy. 
 
 For mercy is not merely pity for a sinful man. 
 
118 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 It is the pity of wrath. All our experiences of 
 the soul are wrought out of the antagonisms of 
 conflicting experience. What is patience ? It is 
 the experience of the sensitive man whose sen- 
 sitiveness is mastered by a dominating love, and 
 therefore endures ; who is roiled and tried, and 
 still maintains an equable temper. No man 
 can be patient who has not strong passions, for 
 patience is passion tamed. He who says, "I 
 know no fear," is no hero. No man knows 
 courage unless he does know fear, and has that 
 in him which is superior to fear, and conquers 
 it ; so that out of the higher and nobler passion 
 
 — patriotism, love of children, love of truth or 
 right — there issues a power that subdues fear, 
 and makes the man conqueror. For courage is 
 caution overcome. So no man knows mercy 
 who does not know how to hate sin. For mercy 
 is hate pitying. It is the wrath of a great 
 righteousness flowing out in a great compassion. 
 It is the reconciliation of these two experiences, 
 
 — the experience that hates and the experience 
 that pities; and because it hates will destroy 
 iniquity, and because it pities will destroy 
 iniquity. 
 
 If we ever are to save our fellow men, we 
 must save them by this mercifulness which is a 
 joint experience of a great hatred because of 
 wrong, and a great pity also because of wrong. 
 
EVOLUTION AND PROPITIATION 119 
 
 Both of these elements must be within us, or we 
 can make no step toward saving the wrong-doer. 
 In Wagner's drama, Parsifal is besought by the 
 wicked Kundry to accept her love and love her 
 in return. " No," he says, " I cannot and I will 
 not." "Come down," she says, "for one hour 
 to my love, and take it and give your love in 
 return," and he answers, " Were I to do it, it 
 would be damnation both for you and for me." 
 There is no way he can save her except he retain 
 the hatred for the iniquity in her ; for if he sac- 
 rifices that, he will not save her, he will only 
 destroy himself. If he did not pity her, his 
 wrath would destroy her; if he did not revolt 
 from her, his unwrathful pity would doom both 
 her and him to a common destruction. For it is 
 never possible for any one to save another unless 
 he has in him both of these elements. 
 
 When slavery ruled this nation in North and 
 in South, in the shop, in the Church, in the 
 council chamber, then a few men rose up in 
 their wrath and in their pity. They could have 
 done nothing if they had not felt a great wrath 
 against slavery ; if they had not felt it as though 
 it were their own sin ; if the weight of the whip 
 had not been as on their own backs, and the 
 marks of the chain as on their own wrists, and 
 the ignominy of the auction-block had not been 
 as their own. They said, This is our shame, 
 
120 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 because we are Americans and this is the sin of 
 America. Without this wrath against slavery, 
 they never could have become leaders in the 
 redemption of the Nation. There are pure and 
 noble men and women working among the more 
 wretched populations of our great cities, to re- 
 deem them from squalor, ignorance, vice, and 
 crime. They have worked five years, ten years, 
 twenty years. Does the filth seem less filthy ? 
 the shame less shameful? the wickedness less 
 wicked? the grog shop, the gambling hell, the 
 house of ill-fame, the crowded, filthy tenement 
 house — do they seem less hateful ? If the soul 
 has grown hardened to these things ; if, by rea- 
 son of familiarity, contempt and indifference 
 have grown up ; if the filth and profanity and 
 drunkenness and licentiousness no longer stir 
 indignation, the missionary is no longer fit for 
 missionary work. He must have this double 
 spirit ; he must have both the flames that con- 
 sume and the tears that quench. 
 
 It is only by human experiences that we can 
 interpret the Divine. We are certainly not to 
 think of God as one who is wrathful and who 
 has to be appeased by some one outside of Him- 
 self. We are certainly not to think of Him as 
 though He were an infinite and eternal Shylock 
 who must have his pound of flesh, and is ap- 
 peased only because there is at his side a more 
 
EVOLUTION AND PROPITIATION 121 
 
 merciful Bassanio who will give the price and 
 let Antonio go free. But neither are we to 
 think of Him as though good - nature were 
 synonymous with love, as though He were an 
 indifferent and easy-going God, who cares more 
 for the present happiness than the real char- 
 acter of His children ; who says, " You have 
 done some wrong things, you have committed 
 some faults, you have fallen into some errors, 
 you have some stains upon you ; but we will let 
 it all pass ; it is of no great consequence." We 
 shall never enter into the mystery of redemption 
 unless we enter in some measure into these two 
 experiences of wrath and pity, and into the 
 mystery of their reconciliation. We must real- 
 ize that God has an infinite and eternal loath- 
 ing of sin. If the impure and the unjust, the 
 drunkard and the licentious, are loathsome to 
 us, what must be the infinite loathing of an 
 infinitely pure Spirit for those who are worldly 
 and selfish, licentious and cruel, ambitious and 
 animal ! But with this great loathing is a great 
 pity. And the pity conquers the loathing, ap- 
 peases it, satisfies it, is reconciled with it, only 
 as it redeems the sinner from his loathsomeness, 
 lifts him up from his degradation, brings him 
 to truth and purity, to love and righteousness ; 
 for only thus is he or can he be brought to God. 
 The Old Theology has, it seems to me, griev- 
 
122 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 ously erred in personifying these two experi- 
 ences ; in imputing all the hate and wrath to 
 the Father and all the pity and compassion 
 to the Son. But the New Theology will still 
 more grievously err if it leaves either the wrath 
 or the pity out of its estimate of the divine 
 nature, or fails to see and teach that reconcilia- 
 tion is the reconciliation of a great pity with a 
 great wrath, the issue of which is a great mercy 
 and a great redemption. 
 
 Once upon a time, so runs the Eoman legend, 
 there came a gulf in the city of Koine. The 
 oracles were consulted and said that the gods 
 were angry, and that, to appease them, Rome 
 must cast her most precious thing into this great 
 gulf, or Rome would be swallowed up. Women 
 brought their jewels, and men their gold, and 
 priests their sacred utensils from the altar ; 
 and still the gulf grew wider. At last one 
 young man said to himself, " What is the most 
 precious thing in Rome ? — what but its youth ? " 
 So he armed himself as for battle, and mounting 
 on a charger, while the people gathered round 
 in awe, he rode straight into the chasm ; and 
 then it closed over him and Rome was safe. 
 That story has often been used as an illustration 
 of the love of Christ redeeming us from the 
 wrath of God. But that is paganism. If that 
 is our notion, we have two gods ; we are poly- 
 
EVOLUTION AND PROPITIATION 123 
 
 theists. If that is our notion, we shall dread 
 the Father and desire to escape Him, for He is 
 an angry God from whom we must be saved. 
 If this is our notion, we shall not be inspired 
 by Christ to love the Father, but shall transfer 
 our love from the Father to the Christ, from 
 the angry God who is to be appeased to the 
 Curtius who has leaped into the chasm to ap- 
 pease Him. 
 
 In the classical Greek the gods are said to be 
 appeased or satisfied or propitiated ; but in the 
 New Testament God is never said to be pro- 
 pitiated, nor is it ever said that Jesus Christ 
 propitiates God or satisfies God's wrath. The 
 Greek verb to propitiate never appears in the 
 New Testament except in the middle voice, 
 which indicates that he who is to be propitiated 
 propitiates himself. 1 In pagan theology the 
 gods are represented as propitiated ; in the New 
 Testament God is represented as self-propiti- 
 ated. Whenever in Christian theology He is 
 represented as propitiated by another, the theo- 
 logy is in so far paganized. He is represented 
 in the Bible as having wrath, anger, indigna- 
 tion ; the vocabulary is almost exhausted in 
 endeavoring to set forth the fire and fierceness 
 
 1 So in 1 John iv. 10 and Romans iii. 25, God is said to have 
 sent forth his Son to be a propitiation. The Father is Him- 
 self the source and origin of this propitiating. 
 
124 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 of this wrath. But it is never intimated that 
 this wrath is appeased or satisfied or propitiated 
 by another ; He appeases it, satisfies it, propiti- 
 ates it Himself. He is His own propitiator. 
 
 If one asks, How can one propitiate himself ? 
 I may reply by the question, How can one be 
 propitiated in any other way ? We are contin- 
 ually going through this double experience of 
 wrath, anger, indignation, wrong, and the ex- 
 perience of appeasing, propitiating, satisfying 
 it by our own forthputtings to cure it. This 
 is a common experience. 
 
 A little child falls into a cesspool and comes 
 crying into the house, the filth dripping from 
 every part of his garments. The first feeling 
 of the mother is a feeling of revulsion ; and the 
 more sensitive she is, the greater is her feeling 
 of revulsion. If she is a half-educated mother, 
 she first gives the boy a box on the ear by way 
 of satisfying her wrath. But if she be a truly 
 refined mother, she takes the child and begins 
 to cleanse him ; and in the very process of 
 stripping off the garments and putting him 
 in the bath and washing him and bringing 
 him out clean and pure, she overcomes, she 
 satisfies, she appeases, she utilizes her very 
 wrath against the filth. If she did not have 
 any such wrath she would not touch the child. 
 You can see the proof of this every day. You 
 
EVOLUTION AND PROPITIATION 125 
 
 may see in the tenement house the child with 
 the filthy face. The mother does not cleanse 
 him because she does not mind filth ; and you 
 do not cleanse him because the child is not 
 your child. You must have the two, the love 
 for the child and the hate of the filth ; then 
 there comes the soap and the water. 
 
 And it is in the process of the cleansing that 
 the revulsion is — not cured, but satisfied. In 
 the very process of the cleansing, the wrath, 
 indignation, revulsion, does its work. There is 
 no righteous wrath which is not a redeeming, 
 a cleansing, a purifying wrath ; and there is no 
 satisfying of it except as love is so joined to 
 wrath that the wrath and the love unite in the 
 process of purification. 
 
 Must not God's justice be satisfied? Yes. 
 But justice is never satisfied by punishment; 
 certainly not by punishment inflicted on an 
 innocent person. Vengeance does not satisfy. 
 It sometimes gluts, but it does not satisfy. The 
 duelist, angered by insult or wrong, challenges 
 his enemy to a duel, runs his sword through 
 the body of his opponent, leaves the life-blood 
 oozing out of his arteries, wipes his sword, and 
 walks off in the brightness of the morning. 
 Satisfied ? Never ! Nemesis follows him ; the 
 vision is ever before his eyes; he has taken 
 his vengeance, and the vengeance itself nestles 
 
126 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 in his heart and breeds future penalty. Even 
 if for a little while he is able to forget that 
 morning, — that ghastly corpse and that oozing 
 blood, — it will come back to him by and by, 
 to torture him ; for vengeance does not satisfy. 
 Arrest the burglar, try him, put him in state 
 prison ; are you satisfied ? The errand-boy has 
 robbed the mail; the employer catches him, 
 brings him before the police magistrate, has 
 him tried, sentenced to Sing Sing, and dismisses 
 him. He punishes him, forgets him, blots the 
 page out of his memory; but he is not satis- 
 fied. Another employer, in like circumstances, 
 says, What can I do for that boy? I must 
 not let him go ; he will become yet worse. He 
 studies the problem ; has the boy committed to 
 the Elmira Keformatory ; when he is reformed, 
 takes him back, finds a place for him, starts 
 him on the path of honesty. That is the man 
 who is satisfied, — the man who appeases his 
 sense of justice by redeeming the boy from the 
 wrong in which he was enmeshed. That is what 
 God is doing. For that Christ came into the 
 world. 
 
 There are many in the Church of Christ 
 who think of God as a just and punitive God, 
 who must be satisfied either by penalty laid on 
 the guilty, or by an equivalent for the penalty. 
 That is one form of paganism. There are many 
 
EVOLUTION AND PROPITIATION 127 
 
 who, reacting against that conception, think of 
 God as an indifferent, careless God, who does 
 not care much about iniquity, does not trouble 
 Himself about it, is not disturbed by it ! That 
 is another form of paganism. And there are 
 many who try to solve the problem by thinking 
 of two Gods, a just God and a merciful God, 
 and imagining that the merciful God by the 
 sacrifice of Himself appeases the wrath of the 
 just God. That also is a modified form of 
 paganism. The one transcendent truth which 
 distinguishes Christianity from all forms of pa- 
 ganism is that it represents God as appeasing 
 His own wrath or satisfying His own justice by 
 the forthputting of His own love. 1 But He saves 
 men from their sins by an experience which we 
 can interpret to ourselves only by calling it a 
 struggle between the sentiments of justice and 
 pity. 
 
 Thus the hypothesis of evolution appears 
 to me to interpret and illumine the doctrine of 
 redemption as stated in the Bible, and the fact 
 of redemption as experienced in life. There 
 is no redemption without this threefold strug- 
 gle : first, by the soul itself acquiring virtue in 
 
 1 It does not come within the scope of this volume to con- 
 sider in detail the teaching of either Old Testament or New 
 Testament on this subject. That must be left for the future 
 volumes of this series on The Bible treated from the evolu- 
 tionist's point of view. See Preface. 
 
128 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 and by the very conflict with temptation ; sec- 
 ond, by some higher being, preeminently by 
 God Himself, laying down His own life that He 
 may impart it to others ; and lastly, struggle in 
 the redeeming Spirit, whether human or divine, 
 a struggle between justice and pity, out of which 
 emerges that mercy which satisfies justice by 
 curing the wrong which has aroused the wrath. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 EVOLUTION AND MIRACLES 
 
 Are miracles consistent with the doctrine 
 of evolution? This is the question I propose 
 to consider in this chapter. It is no part of my 
 purpose to show that the miracles recorded in 
 the Bible actually took place ; only to consider 
 whether belief that they took place is inconsis- 
 tent with belief in evolution as " God's way of 
 doing things." In fact, I believe that some 
 of the events there recorded, and generally 
 regarded as miraculous, did take place ; that 
 others there recorded or referred to did not take 
 place ; and concerning others there recorded 
 I am by no means certain whether they took 
 place as recorded, or not. I believe in the resur- 
 rection of Jesus Christ as the best attested fact 
 of ancient history ; I do not believe that the 
 sun stood still and the moon stayed in the valley 
 of Ajalon at Joshua's command ; and I am un- 
 certain as to what interpretation is to be given 
 to the wonderful stories in the Book of Daniel, 
 — whether they are to be regarded as Dean 
 
130 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 Farrar regards them, as " lofty moral fiction," 
 or as essentially historical, or as partly imagina- 
 tive and partly historical. It is proper, how- 
 ever, to say that in my judgment our hypotheses 
 must always be conformed to attested facts ; we 
 must not determine whether we will accept the 
 evidence as to facts by considering whether they 
 agree with our preconceived hypothesis. If I 
 were convinced, for example, that the resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus Christ is not consistent with the 
 doctrine of evolution, I should be compelled 
 to abandon or modify that doctrine ; I should 
 not abandon my belief in the resurrection. 
 That resurrection I regard as a. fact ; evolution 
 as a theory, — on the whole, the best theory of 
 " God's way of doing things " yet proposed by 
 philosophic thinkers, — the latest word and the 
 best word of science, but not necessarily its last 
 or final word. This may seem to be a digres- 
 sion, but if so it is a necessary digression, — 
 necessary to enable the reader to understand 
 the purpose with which this chapter is written 
 and the point of view of the writer. 
 
 Are miracles consistent with the hypothesis 
 of evolution ? To answer this question we must 
 first clearly understand what is a miracle. 
 
 The word miracle is a translation — or rather 
 a transliteration — of the Latin word miracu- 
 lum, meaning marvel. This word was used in 
 
EVOLUTION AND MIRACLES 131 
 
 the fourth century, in the Vulgate or Latin 
 translation of the Bible, to translate a Greek 
 word which should have been translated signum 
 or sign. Superstition had already entered the 
 Church to misinterpret the Scriptures and de- 
 grade primitive Christianity, and the influence 
 of this degradation is seen in the translation 
 in the fourth century of a Greek word meaning 
 sign by a Latin word meaning marvel. The 
 Greek word meaning marvel (thauma) is never 
 used in the New Testament to designate what 
 we now call miracles. They are never regarded 
 as mere marvels. The very word miracle is a 
 verbal infelicity, — an inheritance from a cor- 
 rupt epoch, bringing with it a corruption of 
 Christian simplicity. 
 
 There are in the original Greek New Testa- 
 ment four words used by the sacred writers to 
 designate the supernatural events which we now 
 infelicitously call miracles. They are respec- 
 tively rendered *' wonder," " work," " power," 
 and " sign." But the word " wonder " itself 
 imperfectly represents the original Greek word 
 so translated, for that word signifies not so 
 much an event exciting wonder as an event 
 attracting attention. Moreover, as if the in- 
 spired writers feared exactly what has taken 
 place, — the substitution of an appeal to mere 
 marvelousness or wonder for the appeal to the 
 
132 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 truth signified by the sign, — the word rendered 
 wonder is very rarely used except in combina- 
 tion with the word sign, as in the familiar 
 phrase, " signs and wonders." Our first an- 
 swer, then, to the question, What is a miracle ? 
 is that it is not a mere marvel. The New Tes- 
 tament knows nothing of thaumaturgy except 
 to condemn it as superstition. It never treats 
 a marvel as a miracle. It never confounds re- 
 verence for a truth or a person with astonish- 
 ment at an event. If Professor Huxley had 
 considered these simple facts, he possibly never 
 would have written his " Essay on the Value 
 of Witnesses to the Miraculous," in which he 
 confounds marvels and the New Testament 
 miracles, which from the New Testament point 
 of view have nothing in common. If our Eng- 
 lish version had been first translated from the 
 Greek into the English without the intervention 
 of the Vulgate, the word miracle would prob- 
 ably never have appeared in our language to 
 puzzle some and befog others. Dropping, then, 
 for the moment this infelicitous word, and go- 
 ing back to the New Testament writings, we 
 find used in them to designate those extraordi- 
 nary events which we are now accustomed to 
 designate by the word miracle, these four words, 
 " wonder," " work," " power," and " sign." We 
 may safely assume that any event which fulfills 
 
EVOLUTION AND MIRACLES 133 
 
 the meaning of these four words is a miracle 
 within the meaning of the sacred writers ; and 
 we may perhaps safely add that no event is a 
 miracle unless it does fulfill their fourfold mean- 
 ing. 
 
 Such an event must be a wonder, — that is, 
 an event compelling attention by awakening 
 surprise and exciting at least the spirit of in- 
 quiry, as the burning bush compelled the atten- 
 tion of Moses, and led him to say, " I will now 
 turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush 
 is not burnt. " It must be a work, — that is, an 
 achievement, the accomplishment of some bene- 
 ficent purpose. The devil calls on Jesus to cast 
 Himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple, 
 for God will bear Him up so that He will not 
 dash His foot against a stone ; thus all the peo- 
 ple will see His divinity and be conquered by 
 the wonder. Jesus Christ refuses. This would 
 be a marvel, but it would not be a work, and the 
 signs of His divinity must all lie in the achieve- 
 ment of worthy ends. It must be a power, — 
 that is, it must indicate a power more than 
 human ; thus, when the paralytic is healed, 
 the people "glorified God, saying, "We never 
 saw it on this fashion,'' or, on another occasion, 
 witnessing the healing of the sick by Jesus, 
 they perceived " the power of Jehovah was 
 present to heal them." Finally, it must be 
 
f 
 
 134 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 a sign, that is, the indication or attestation of 
 a divine message or messenger. So Caiaphas 
 says, " This man doeth many signs ; if we let 
 Him thus alone, all men will believe on Him." 
 Following this clue in our endeavor to ascertain 
 what the New Testament writers mean us to 
 understand are the distinguishing characteristics 
 of the events which we call miracles, — but 
 which they never call so, — we shall not be far 
 astray if we combine these four words and define 
 the events as follows : An event compelling 
 attention and awakening wonder, indicating 
 superhuman power, accomplishing some practi- 
 cal work, — generally, at least in the New Testa- 
 ment, beneficent in its character, — and furnish- 
 ing a sign of a divine message or messenger. 
 
 If this definition is correct, we may dismiss at 
 once such assertions as that of Renan, " Jesus 
 had to choose between these two alternatives, 
 either to renounce His mission or to become a 
 wonder-worker," or that of Professor Huxley : 
 " Jesus is exhibited (in the Second Gospel) as 
 a wonder-worker and exorcist of the first rank." l 
 Wonder-worker was exactly what Jesus was not, 
 and constantly refused to be. He was con- 
 tinually appealed to, to work wonders in attesta- 
 tion of His mission, and as constantly declined. 
 
 1 Renan's Life of Jesus, chapter xvi., " Science and Christian 
 Tradition ; " Huxley's Essays, Preface, p. xxiii. 
 
EVOLUTION AND MIRACLES 135 
 
 When His sympathy was appealed to, and by His 
 superhuman power He could do a deed of mercy, 
 as by the healing of the paralytic, the cure of the 
 leper or the blind, or the raising of the dead, 
 He would not refuse. He did not decline to 
 give men help because the help given would 
 excite wonder, but He did invariably refuse to 
 perform works for the sake of exciting wonder. 
 With the possible exception of the story of the 
 money found in the fish's mouth by Peter at 
 Jesus's direction, — a story for that very reason 
 to be regarded with doubt, — every so-called 
 miracle was a use of His power in a work of love. 
 It did excite wonder, and it became a sign of 
 His mission; but it was never done to excite 
 wonder, and it may be boldly affirmed that it 
 would have been no true sign of His mission if 
 it had been wrought for the ignoble purpose of 
 exciting wonder. We may for the same reason 
 dismiss summarily such stories of ecclesiastical 
 miracles as those which Professor Huxley has 
 gathered and rehearsed in the Essay above re- 
 ferred to. Marvels they doubtless are; but 
 they are neither works nor signs. There is no 
 parallel between them and the New Testament 
 so-called miracles, except that both are unusual 
 events. Professor Huxley narrates as an illus- 
 tration of an ecclesiastical miracle the story of 
 Eginhard, about A. d. 830, who, about to remove 
 
136 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 certain sacred relics from a chest unworthy of 
 so great a treasure, beheld this " stupendous 
 miracle, worthy of all admiration. For, just as 
 when it is going to rain, pillars and slabs and 
 marble images exude moisture, and, as it were, 
 sweat, so the chest which contained the most 
 sacred relics was found moist with blood exud- 
 ing on all sides." A marvel this certainly was, 
 but it had no other characteristic of a New 
 Testament so-called miracle ; it was not a work, 
 for it accomplished nothing, nor a sign of super- 
 human power, for it indicated nothing. It was 
 simply a marvel, nothing more. Whether we 
 believe or disbelieve it is morally wholly im- 
 material ; it attests no truth. 
 
 Certain events in the Old Testament which 
 have been regarded as miracles fall into the 
 same category of mere marvels. The reason 
 for believing that the story of Jonah and the 
 great fish is a satirical fiction, not a history, is 
 partly its literary structure ; it is also partly the 
 nature of the marvel related. Marvel the swal- 
 lowing and preservation of the prophet certainly 
 is ; but miracle in the New Testament sense it 
 as certainly is not. For it was not a sign : not 
 to the sailors, for they knew nothing of it ; not 
 to the people of Nineveh, for they knew nothing 
 of it ; not to Jonah, for he needed no sign of 
 Jehovah's presence and power, having already 
 
EVOLUTION AND MIRACLES 137 
 
 confessed both in asking the sailors to cast him 
 into the sea. No mere marvel is a miracle in the 
 New Testament sense of that term. Nothing is 
 such a miracle unless it is a beneficent work, 
 and one which constitutes a sign of a divine 
 truth or person. The question, then, I repeat, 
 is this : Is belief that God has thus attested a 
 divine message or messenger by remarkable 
 works of love and power inconsistent with evolu- 
 tion ? that is, with the belief that His way of 
 doing things is the way of working from within 
 outward and in accordance with regular laws, 
 not the way of working from without mechani- 
 cally and by successive interventions ? 
 
 That belief in the miracles is inconsistent 
 with the notion that " God created amoebae, and 
 amoebae did the rest," is plain enough ; but 
 then, no intelligent and honest reader can 
 really suppose that this is what the Christian 
 evolutionist means by evolution ; and it would 
 hardly seem that any one familiar with the 
 English language in its modern uses could 
 suppose that this is what any modern writer 
 means by evolution. It ought not to be neces- 
 sary — to honest and careful readers it is not 
 necessary — to restate my theistic faith. But 
 it may be necessary to repeat here what has 
 been said before, in order to avoid possible 
 misapprehension,. The Christian evolutionist 
 
138 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 believes that God is the one universal and al- 
 ways present Cause ; that there are no secondary- 
 causes, and that God's method of manifesting 
 His eternal presence is the method of growth, 
 not of manufacture, by a power dwelling within 
 nature and working outward, not by a power 
 dwelling without and working upon nature. 
 Belief in miracles is belief that there have been 
 in history certain wonderful works of love which 
 have attested the divine presence ; belief in evo- 
 lution is belief that growth is " God's way of 
 doing things." Are these two beliefs incon- 
 sistent ? 
 
 In considering this question I start with Her- 
 bert Spencer's axiom that " we are ever in the 
 presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy 
 from which all things proceed." This Energy 
 is personal; not It, but He; an Energy with 
 individual consciousness; an Energy which 
 thinks, feels, wills. He transcends all phe- 
 nomena, but dwells in them and manifests Him- 
 self through them. He is a "Word, ever mani- 
 festing Himself ; never from eternity has He 
 been a Brahma, dwelling in unconsciousness, — 
 always a Jehovah, putting forth His power in 
 self-manifestations. Not at some remote crea- 
 tive period did He thus manifest Himself in 
 Nature, creating forces then and leaving them 
 to operate automatically thereafter; all forces 
 
EVOLUTION AND MIRACLES 139 
 
 are the one Eternal Force ; all days are creative 
 days ; all growth has the secret of its process in 
 His perpetual presence. In this self-manifes- 
 tation He has brought into life moral beings, 
 like Himself in this, that they also think, feel, 
 will ; like Himself, therefore, in possessing per- 
 sonality, consciousness, freedom, and, therefore, 
 moral character. In these men, His children, 
 formed by Him, but by processes of growth, not 
 by processes of manufacture, out of preexisting 
 forms by His indwelling, not out of dead and 
 undivine things by external handiwork, He has 
 further revealed Himself. He has in their con- 
 sciousness spoken, in their reason inspired His 
 thoughts, in their hearts His love, in their will 
 His purpose. He has done this preeminently 
 in one chosen race, and in that race preemi- 
 nently in chosen prophets. Why He chose them 
 it is needless here to inquire. Perhaps because 
 He chose them, and for no other reason what- 
 ever, — so says the Calvinist ; perhaps because 
 He foresaw in them adaptation to be recipients 
 of His higher life and revelators of it to their 
 brethren, — so says the Arminian. At length, 
 when the fullness of time came, He who had 
 spoken in men, and revealed Himself through 
 men in fragmentary ways and in divers man- 
 ners, enters one chosen Man, fills Him full of 
 Himself, dwells in Him, and through this Man, 
 
140 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 Christ Jesus, carries still further that manifesta- 
 tion of Himself for which through the ages He 
 had been preparing, and from which, by the 
 same power of indwelling, He will carry on this 
 self-manifestation until it is completed in a race 
 of men worthy to be called the children of God ; 
 that is, a race who in all their characteristics 
 have evidently, unmistakably, unquestionably, 
 not merely been made by Him, but have pro- 
 ceeded from Him, so that they are in very truth 
 partakers of His nature, companions of His life, 
 manifestations of His character. 
 
 Is there anything in this conception of life as 
 a continuous, consistent manifestation of God, 
 all of it proceeding from Him, all of it having for 
 its object a manifestation of Him, and all of it 
 proceeding in a normal and regular manner 
 along the line of cause and effect, — is there 
 anything in this inconsistent with belief that in 
 the life of the Divine Man there were unusual 
 manifestations of the Eternal Power, such as 
 arrested attention then, and served then and 
 since as a sign of the eternal truth that God is 
 in His world working out its redemption ? 
 
 The opinion that a miracle is a violation of 
 the laws of nature is inconsistent with evolution ; 
 the opinion that there have ever been any mani- 
 festations of God is inconsistent with atheistic 
 evolution. But the opinion that God has mani- 
 
EVOLUTION AND MIRACLES 141 
 
 fested Himself in unusual ways is not inconsist- 
 ent with belief that He is always manifesting 
 Himself in all conceivable ways in the ordinary 
 processes of life. 1 
 
 For let it be remembered again that a miracle 
 is not a manifestation of an unusual power, but 
 an unusual manifestation of a continuous power. 
 It is sometimes said that all nature is a miracle. 
 If a miracle is simply a sign of superhuman 
 power, that is true. There is really no greater 
 
 1 It has been said that this view " belittles miracles." It 
 should therefore be said, for the benefit of the non-scholastic 
 reader, that there is nothing new in it. It is as old as Augus- 
 tine. " We say that all portents are contrary to nature ; but 
 they are not so. For how is that contrary to nature which 
 happens by the will of God ? since the will of so mighty a Cre- 
 ator is certainly the nature of each created thing. A portent, 
 therefore, happens not contrary to nature, but contrary to 
 what we know as nature." — Augustine : The City of God, 
 Book XXI. chap. viii. p. 459. 
 
 " But I call that a miracle, whatever appears that is diffi- 
 cult or unusual above the hope or power of them who won- 
 der." — On the Projit of Believing, § 34, p. 364. 
 
 " Since men, intent on a different matter, have lost the con- 
 sideration of the works of God, by which they should daily 
 praise Him as the Creator, God has, as it were, reserved to Him- 
 self the doing of certain extraordinary actions, that by strik- 
 ing them with wonder He might rouse men as from sleep to 
 worship Him. A dead man has risen again ; men marvel : so 
 many are born daily, and none marvels. If we reflect more 
 considerately, it is a matter of greater wonder for one to be 
 who was not before, than for one who was to come to life 
 again." — On the Gospel of St. John, Tractate VIII. chap. i. 
 
142 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 manifestation of God in the multiplication of 
 five loaves and two small fishes into food suffi- 
 cient to feed five thousand than in the multipli- 
 cation of a bushel of seed-corn into a hundred 
 bushels ; no greater revelation of His life-giving 
 power in a resurrection than in a birth. The 
 only difference between the two is that one is 
 common, and the other uncommon. And this 
 answers the question which Benan asks, Why- 
 are not miracles repeated ? The reply is, If they 
 were repeated they would cease to be miracles. 
 A miracle constantly repeated becomes a process 
 of nature. What distinguishes a miracle from 
 a process of nature is simply that it is not re- 
 peated ; it is extraordinary, and for that reason 
 attracts attention. If resurrection from the dead 
 were as common as awaking from sleep, we 
 should think as little of it. The chief reason 
 why modern thinkers find it difficult to believe 
 in what we call miracles is either because we 
 have blindly accepted the too common definition 
 of miracles as a violation of the laws of nature, 
 or because we have confounded them with mere 
 marvels and wonders, or because we have thought 
 of God as an absentee God, and the miracle as 
 the token of an exceptional presence. The doc- 
 trine of evolution understood as a doctrine of 
 Divine Immanence, the conception of life as a 
 continuous and uninterrupted manifestation of 
 
EVOLUTION AND MIRACLES 143 
 
 God, will remove these philosophical objections 
 to the miraculous conceived as unusual manifes- 
 tations of Him. When we believe that all phe- 
 nomena are directed to a spiritual purpose, and 
 that the object of all life is to manifest the Eter- 
 nal Presence, we shall not be surprised to find 
 in history special manifestations of that Pre- 
 sence in order to serve that spiritual purpose. 
 
 For evolution does not teach that the processes 
 of what we call nature cannot be brought under 
 spiritual control. On the contrary, it shows 
 their operation under the spiritual control of 
 man, guided and directed to a definite purpose 
 by human intelligence and human will. Evolu- 
 tion is carried on by what we call natural selec- 
 tion up to the point when man appears upon the 
 scene ; then man himself begins to direct, con- 
 trol, modify, regulate, evolution. He shapes it 
 as he will ; his intelligence masters it and directs 
 it. He determines whether the soil shall pro- 
 duce a rose or a lily, an oak or an elm. He 
 finds a prairie strewed with grass and wild 
 flowers, and out of that same prairie he evolves 
 this year a cornfield, next year a wheatfield. 
 Early travelers tell us of a great American de- 
 sert, apparently useless to man, which extended 
 from the Missouri Eiver to the Kocky Mountains. 
 It has now become a fertile and prosperous re- 
 gion. Man has made this former wilderness to 
 
144 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 bud and blossom as a rose. He has used the 
 forces of nature, has conformed to the laws of 
 nature, and thus has regulated the evolutionary 
 processes of nature. In thus directing them to 
 a predetermined end, he follows in the footsteps 
 of One greater than he is. The charcoal-burn- 
 ers in the mountains, who fell the trees and burn 
 them in a furnace in which very little oxygen is 
 admitted, are simply imitating on a small scale 
 what in the far-off centuries God did when He 
 turned the great trees of the carboniferous era 
 into coal. Out of this coal formerly men dis- 
 tilled the illuminating oil. They did but repeat 
 what God had done in the former ages when He 
 filled the subterranean reservoirs with a like 
 material by a similar process. Our dynamo — 
 a magnetic wheel revolving with great rapidity 
 in a magnetic field — imitates God's dynamo ; 
 for now we know that this globe on which we 
 live is itself a great magnet, and is itself re- 
 volving in a magnetic field. The growths of 
 the past have been under the supervision of a 
 controlling will, directed by intelligence to be- 
 nevolent ends. The processes of nature and of 
 civilization combine to demonstrate beyond all 
 question that matter is subordinate to spirit. If 
 by nature is meant the physical realm, then the 
 supernatural is not only about us, but within us. 
 The whole fabric of modern civilization is based 
 
EVOLUTION AND MIRACLES 145 
 
 upon this : that matter is controlled by that which 
 is superior to matter ; that spirit can direct, con- 
 trol, manipulate, physical forces. 
 
 Why, then, should we think it an extraordi- 
 nary thing that the Father, " of whom the whole 
 family in heaven and earth is named," should 
 accompany the two great messages the human 
 race needs with some token of His presence such 
 as the blindest could not fail to see ? What does 
 man need, what does America need, more than 
 these two words, Law and Love ? The voice of 
 conscience within us echoes the voice of a divine 
 authority without. The world needed some 
 attestation of that in the beginning. Once at- 
 tested, once recognized, it has gone on growing 
 in human consciousness until the laws of con- 
 science are recognized as the laws of God. And 
 that other message, — that when men have vio- 
 lated God's law, there is a power not ourselves 
 that makes for righteousness, — why should we 
 think it strange that the Father should give that 
 message, and should accompany it with attesta- 
 tions of His presence and His power such as 
 made the world stop and listen ? 
 
 If we approach the question of miracles from 
 the point of view of a pure physicist, we shall in 
 the first place be inclined to disbelieve in them, 
 and in the second place not much care whether 
 they occurred or not. With a phenomenon 
 
146 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 occurring but once, and never since repeated, 
 science does not concern itself. But what Camp- 
 bell Fraser has put as a question we may trans- 
 form into affirmation: "The physical miracle 
 finds its natural significance in its moral rela- 
 tions to the persons in the universe, rather than 
 in its physical relations to the things in the uni- 
 verse." The miracle is an unusual witness to 
 Him whose presence is constantly witnessed, 
 but, because the witness is constant, is too often 
 ignored. 
 
 The doctrine of evolution, then, is not, as it 
 seems to me, inconsistent with belief that at 
 certain epochs in the world's history, and for 
 certain special moral ends, there occurred un- 
 usual events which awakened attention and have 
 served as signs of a superhuman power wrought 
 in works either of judgment or mercy, although 
 almost uniformly the latter. And this convic- 
 tion, it is proper to add, I share with evolution- 
 ists who on other grounds absolutely reject the 
 miraculous. " It is not," says Professor Hux- 
 ley, " upon any a priori considerations that ob- 
 jections either to the supposed efficacy of prayer 
 or to the supposed occurrences of miracles can 
 be based, and to my mind the fatal objection to 
 both these suppositions is the inadequacy of the 
 evidence to prove any given case of such occur- 
 rence which has been adduced." The question 
 
EVOLUTION AND MIRACLES 147 
 
 whether God answers prayer, the question 
 whether the so-called miracles or any of them 
 recorded in the Bible ever took place, are to be 
 determined by evidence simply. If the evidence 
 sustains the affirmative answer, there is nothing 
 in evolution inconsistent with that answer. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 evolution and miracles (continued) 
 
 A miracle — that is, an extraordinary event 
 arresting attention and awakening wonder, ac- 
 complishing some beneficent work, and by its 
 manifestation of a superhuman power serving 
 as a sign of a divine message or messenger — 
 may either be in accordance with human experi- 
 ence or may transcend human experience. The 
 first is as truly a miracle as the second ; what 
 constitutes it a miracle is not that it is an event 
 out of the ordinary course of nature, but that it j 
 serves effectually as a sign of superhuman power 
 in the accomplishment of a moral end. The 
 two greatest miracles of the Old Testament 
 are not events transcending human experience ; 
 they were wrought by what we customarily call 
 natural forces, and in accordance with what we 
 call natural laws. What made them miracles 
 was such an evident connection with a moral j 
 end that they served as signs of the directing j 
 presence of a moral Person, possessing super- j 
 human power. The first of these miracles was j 
 
EVOLUTION AND MIRACLES 149 
 
 the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, the 
 second the passage of the Red Sea by the chil- 
 dren of Israel. 
 
 The desolate region of the Dead Sea is a 
 perpetual attestation of the awful work of de- 
 struction wrought there in some early age by 
 a combination of earthquake and volcano. The 
 now extinct volcano furnished the fire and brim- 
 stone which Jehovah rained from heaven. The 
 accompanying earthquake was the means by 
 which He overthrew cities which the inhabitants 
 had fondly imagined were built to endure for- 
 ever. The bitumen with which the soil abounds, 
 set on fire by subterranean heats, made the 
 smoke of the country to go up from the plain 
 as the smoke of a furnace. The fall of saline 
 ashes from the volcano caught and incrusted 
 the belated fugitive and arrested her flight. In 
 the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, nar- 7 
 rated in the Book of Genesis, there is nothing / 
 more difficult for an evolutionist to believe than 
 in the accounts of the destruction of Lisbon by 
 earthquake as narrated in secular history. Nor 
 is it made more incredible because a sacred 
 writer saw in it a sign of divine judgment on 
 cities wholly given over to infamous wicked- 
 ness. 
 
 The other great miracle of the Old Testa- 
 ment, that which is indelibly connected in Jew- 
 
150 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 ish history with the birth of the nation, the 
 passage of the Ked Sea, is distinctly attributed 
 by the sacred historian to what we call natural 
 causes. " And Jehovah," he says, " caused the 
 sea to go back by a strong east wind all that 
 night, and made the sea dry." The traveler 
 may to-day pass over the roadway, with marshes 
 on either side, where once on one side was the 
 sea, and on the other a shallow bay, and he may 
 see the dangerous quicksands where Pharaoh's 
 chariot-wheels dragged heavily. He may thus 
 see in the topography of the locality a witness 
 to the scientific probability of the incident so 
 graphically described by the sacred historian. 
 So long as high winds and ebbing tides uncover 
 beaches along the sea, and returning tides and 
 changing winds re-cover them, so long he will 
 find nothing in the doctrine of evolution incon- 
 gruous with the belief that Israel passed over 
 a ford thus prepared, and that Pharaoh's host, 
 following, were caught by the returning tide and 
 overwhelmed in the treacherous sands. There 
 is nothing, then, in this narrative more difficult 
 for a scientist to believe than in the account in 
 our own history of a protecting fog under cover 
 of which Washington's army escaped after the 
 battle of Long Island, or in that of the incur- 
 sion of the sea, in the history of the Nether- 
 lands, by which the siege of Ley den was raised 
 
EVOLUTION AND MIRACLES 151 
 
 in the days of William the Silent. Whether 
 these events occurred is, therefore, simply a 
 question of history. The evidence of the de- 
 struction of the Cities of the Plain is to be found 
 in the aspect of the Dead Sea valley, which bears 
 witness to a dreadful catastrophe in the remote 
 past. The evidence of the passage of the Red 
 Sea is found in a tradition wrought into the his- 
 tory of a great people, repeated in their songs, 
 celebrated in their great national birthday, and 
 incidentally confirmed by the physical charac- 
 teristics of the region, which at once interpret 
 the account and confirm its accuracy. 
 
 The other form of miracle transcends human 
 experience. It presents to us a phenomenon 
 unlike any with which we are familiar, and must 
 either be left unexplained, or explained, if at 
 all, by hypotheses, not indeed irrational, but 
 confessedly unproved. Most of the miracles 
 of the New Testament are of this description. 
 It is true that there are in the cure of nervous 
 diseases, and especially in the control and cure 
 of the insane, by a strong and dominant nature, 
 some analogies which throw light upon certain 
 cures wrought by Christ and narrated in the 
 Gospels. It is true that the triumph of medical 
 science in restoring life to persons who, accord- 
 ing to all the tests we know how to apply, have 
 appeared to be absolutely dead, suggests a pos- 
 
152 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 sible interpretation of some of the cases of re- 
 surrection. Yet the great majority of Christ's 
 miracles, including that which is the most tran- 
 scendent of them all, His own resurrection from 
 the dead, transcend all our experiences of life. 
 All that we can do is, first to try to state them 
 to ourselves in thinkable forms, and then to 
 ask whether the evidence is such as to warrant 
 our belief in them. Within the limits of this 
 chapter, I can illustrate this method by only 
 a single instance, that of the resurrection of 
 Jesus Christ, and can do even this only very 
 inadequately. 
 
 The accounts of His resurrection, as given 
 in the four Gospels, may here be condensed 
 into a sentence : Jesus Christ was sentenced to 
 death; the priests and Pharisees were present 
 to make sure that He should not escape their 
 malice ; had He been taken from the cross be- 
 fore death was assured, the centurion would 
 have paid the penalty of his neglect with his 
 own life ; and, finally, the death of the crucified 
 was demonstrated before the body was taken 
 from the cross, by the thrust of the spear into 
 the side. The body was buried in the tomb on 
 Friday evening. On Sunday morning the dis- 
 ciples came to the tomb, to find it empty : they 
 were in despair, thinking that the body had 
 been stolen ; nor was their despair overcome 
 
EVOLUTION AND MIRACLES 153 
 
 until after repeated appearances of the risen 
 Lord to them, singly and in companies. This 
 is the account. Is it so far consistent with what 
 we know of God's way of doing things as to 
 be inherently credible ? If so, is it sufficiently 
 attested by adequate evidence to be credited? 
 My answer to both these questions is in the 
 affirmative. 
 
 I. What is God's way of doing things, ac- 
 cording to evolution ? It is to develop life by 
 successive processes, until a spirit akin to His 
 appears in a bodily organism akin to that of 
 the lower animals from which it has been pre- 
 viously evolved. This bodily organism is from 
 birth in a state of constant decay and repair. 
 At length the time comes when, through disease 
 or old age, the repair no longer keeps pace with 
 the decay. Then the body returns to the earth, 
 and the spirit to God who gave it. This dis- 
 embodying of the spirit we call death. There 
 is at death an end of the body. It knows no 
 resurrection save in grass and flowers. The 
 resurrection, the anastasis or up-standing as 
 the New Testament calls it, is the resurrection 
 of the spirit. The phrase " resurrection of the 
 body " never occurs in the New Testament. 
 But every death is a resurrection of the spirit. 
 What we call death the New Testament calls 
 an " exodus " or an emancipation from bondage, 
 
154 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 an " unmooring " or setting the ship free from 
 its imprisonment. 1 The spirit is released from 
 its confinement, and this release is death. 
 Death is, in short, not a cessation of existence, 
 not a break in existence ; it is simply what 
 Socrates declared it to be, " the separation of 
 the soul and body. And being dead is the 
 attainment of this separation; when the soul 
 exists in herself, and is parted from the body, 
 and the body is parted from the soul, — that is 
 death." 2 
 
 The Christian who holds this view of death 
 and resurrection believes that that occurred to 
 Jesus Christ which occurs to all God's children 
 at death : the spirit was separated from the 
 body to exist in itself. In this general belief 
 in a phenomenon transcending experience there 
 is nothing more inconsistent with evolution than 
 in the belief in the separation of the child from 
 the mother at birth, or in the belief that the 
 grub issues at a certain stage of its existence 
 from its subaqueous life and enters upon a new 
 experience as a dragon-fly. In brief, evolution 
 is not inconsistent with the idea that a living 
 creature in one stage of existence is being pre- 
 pared for a future stage of existence which will 
 
 1 Luke ix. 31, English " decease ; " 2 Tim. iv. 6, English 
 " departure." 
 
 2 Phcedo, Jowett's translation, vol i. p. 390. 
 
EVOLUTION AND MIRACLES 155 
 
 entirely transcend the present experience; on 
 the contrary, this is precisely what it teaches 
 us to expect. The only real question in respect 
 to the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not, Is it 
 incredible that the resurrection took place ? but, 
 Is it incredible that it was followed by such 
 appearances to the disciples as to bring it within 
 the range of their observation, and afford them 
 tangible evidence that it had taken place ? Such 
 an appearance is certainly extraordinary ; but 
 it seems to me not at all incredible either that 
 the spirit should have returned to reanimate 
 the body, or that it should have given visible 
 evidence of itself as disembodied, for the very 
 purpose of converting what was in Socrates and 
 Cicero a mere vague expectation into what has 
 become in the Christian Church throughout the 
 ages an assured and certain faith. 
 
 II. Assuming that the appearances of Jesus 
 Christ to His disciples after His death are not 
 inherently incredible, are they so attested that 
 we have reason to credit them ? An adequate 
 answer to this question cannot be expected to 
 be crowded into a paragraph, when volumes 
 have been written in answering it. I can only 
 say in the briefest terms why I regard those 
 appearances as among the best attested facts of 
 ancient history. 
 
 Literary study has demonstrated that three 
 
156 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 of the four Gospels were written in less than 
 half a century after Christ's death; that the 
 fourth Gospel was written within three quarters 
 of a century after that death ; and that in all 
 four we have substantially the testimony of 
 the eye-witnesses themselves, not the product 
 of a later tradition. That these eye-witnesses 
 were not intentional deceivers is now universally 
 admitted ; J that they were deceived by Jesus 
 Christ, as they would have been on the supposi- 
 tion that He did not really die, but only swooned, 
 no one will now pretend to affirm ; that their 
 belief was the product of their enthusiastic ex- 
 pectations of a resurrection, as Renan suggests, 
 is absolutely inconsistent with all that we know 
 of these singularly prosaic, unemotional, unim- 
 aginative characters, and with all that the ac- 
 counts tell us of their disbelief in the first 
 reports, and of the frequent appearances neces- 
 sary to convince them of the fact of the resur- 
 rection. 
 
 If this, their testimony, stood alone, it would 
 probably be disregarded by the great majority 
 of mankind as unimportant, if not incredible. 
 But it does not stand alone. It is closely re- 
 lated to the most stupendous changes which 
 have ever taken place in the life of the world. 
 
 1 " Only this much need be acknowledged, that the disciples 
 firmly believed that Jesus had arisen. " — Strauss. 
 
EVOLUTION AND MIRACLES 157 
 
 Perhaps the least, although the most immedi- 
 ately visible of these changes is the institution 
 of the First Day of the week as one of universal 
 observance. This day has passed over from 
 Palestine to Greece, Rome, Continental Europe, 
 Great Britain, and America. It has survived 
 changes of government, law, civilization, and 
 language, as well as of ritual and creed. It 
 is alike recognized by Roman Catholic, Greek, 
 Anglican, and Puritan, and is coming to be 
 recognized by Jews, and demanded as a privi- 
 lege by unbelievers. This day, which neither 
 covetousness nor infidelity has been able to abol- 
 ish, neither superstition nor legalism to de- 
 stroy, celebrates nothing and is unmeaning 
 if there was no resurrection of Jesus Christ. 
 Yet this day is but a symbol of changes vastly 
 greater. On faith in that resurrection the 
 Church is itself historically built. Within less 
 than thirty years after it was supposed to have 
 taken place, Paul, in his Epistle to the Corinthi- 
 ans, — written, according to the testimony of all 
 critics, before A. D. 60, — declared to the Chris- 
 tians in pagan Corinth that their Christian faith 
 was built upon this fact, and that if Christ had 
 not risen their faith was vain. Not only the 
 Church, but Christianity as a historical religion, 
 is founded upon faith in that resurrection. 
 Christianity is not merely a new or a reformed 
 
158 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 ethical system ; it is a message of victory over 
 sin and death. It has appealed not merely 
 to the consciences of mankind, but still more 
 to their love and to their hope. The assurance 
 of immortality expressed in the Easter song, 
 " Thanks be to God which giveth us the vic- 
 tory," has appealed to the discouraged and the 
 despairing, and given them new life. That new 
 life has borne its fruits in a civilization which 
 has always been proportioned to the strength of 
 that faith and hope in a risen Christ. If Christ 
 did not rise from the dead, the Christian Sun- 
 day, the Christian Church, and Christian civili- 
 zation are founded on a falsehood, on a delusion, 
 if not on a fraud. Science requires belief in an 
 intellectual order in the universe. Moral life 
 requires belief in a moral order in the universe. 
 To believe that the whole fabric of Christian 
 civilization is founded on a lie is to believe that 
 in the moral realm causes have no relation to 
 the effects which they produce. It is to rele- 
 gate us to moral chaos. 
 
 It will not reasonably be expected that in two 
 paragraphs in such a volume as this the grounds 
 of Christian faith in Christ's resurrection can 
 be adequately stated. All that I have here at- 
 tempted is to indicate the twofold basis on which 
 that faith seems to me to rest. That faith as- 
 sumes that God is, and that God is good ; that 
 
EVOLUTION AND MIRACLES 159 
 
 He manifests himself to His children in order 
 that He may bring His children into fellowship 
 with Him ; that Christ is the incomparable One 
 in human history whose life and character fur- 
 nish a unique manifestation of the Father of all 
 the living. And, assuming this, Christian faith 
 believes in the manifestation of Christ to His 
 disciples after His death as a demonstration 
 of that resurrection which accompanies every 
 dying : first, because faithful, honest, and trust- 
 worthy men have borne witness to such appear- 
 ances; and, second, because Christian civiliza- 
 tion, the Christian Church, and the Christian 
 Sunday are living and perpetual witnesses to 
 such resurrection. Into these two categories 
 fall the evidences which have led the greatest 
 statesmen and jurists — men accustomed to sift 
 and weigh evidence — to accept the visible re- 
 surrection of Jesus Christ as one of the best 
 attested facts of ancient history. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 EVOLUTION AND IMMOETALITT 
 
 Immortality does not seem to me to be ca- 
 pable of scientific demonstration. If by immor- 
 tality we simply mean that those who seem to 
 have died continue to live after death, ghosts, 
 slates, table-tippings, rappings, and such like 
 might, perhaps, afford a scientific demonstration 
 of this not very important fact. But if im- 
 mortality means a life in the other world that 
 transcends any life in this, a life far beyond 
 any experience here below, a life free from the 
 trammels of the body, a life glorious beyond 
 all imaginings, it is impossible that it should 
 be demonstrated. For such a life lies in the 
 future, and science has to do exclusively with 
 the present and the past. It may anticipate 
 the future, but it can test only what actually is. 
 All that science can do respecting immortality 
 is to look at life from the evolutionary point of 
 view and see what evolution would naturally 
 lead us to anticipate in the future, — death or 
 life. And it appears to me that belief in evo- 
 
EVOLUTION AND IMMORTALITY 161 
 
 lution, so far from weakening faith in immor- 
 tality, strengthens it, and I might almost say- 
 necessitates it. It does not demonstrate immor- 
 tality, and yet I do not see how one can be a 
 consistent evolutionist and think that " death 
 ends all." 
 
 Let the reader imagine himself looking upon 
 a vast cloud of subtle but visible ether. As he 
 looks, this ether gathers itself together into a 
 globe and begins a revolution gradually increas- 
 ing in rapidity. As it revolves, it cools, sepa- 
 rates into solid and liquid matter; mists arise 
 from it, and become floating and swimming 
 clouds; mimic mountains are pushed up from 
 its gradually corrugated surface ; mimic oceans 
 and seas and lakes and rivers are formed upon 
 it; forests appear, and various verdure, and 
 decorating flowers, and, last of all, moving crea- 
 tures in air and sea and land. Something like 
 this science does see. It sees the great formless 
 chaos gathering itself together into a globe and 
 hanging unsupported in the heavens ; it sees 
 through the long ages this globe gradually cool- 
 ing; it sees the oceans and the seas and the 
 lakes and the rivers forming below ; it sees the 
 steam rising into clouds and floating above ; it 
 sees the great forests growing, the grass and 
 verdure springing up; it sees the process of 
 storage of coal and iron and copper and gold and 
 
162 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 silver in the mountain fastnesses ; it sees the 
 earth made rich with juices which will feed un- 
 numbered thousands in the future ; it sees grad- 
 ually appearing upon this globe animals, — 
 fishes, reptiles, birds, mammals, and, last of all, 
 man ; and, looking upon him, it sees him tak- 
 ing possession of this globe. He is probably, 
 as an infant, the feeblest of all the infant ani- 
 mals, and even as a full-grown adult he does not 
 compare in strength with many others. They 
 have advantages over him in many respects; 
 but he alone possesses reason, conscience, and a 
 rational and moral will. In this intellectual 
 and moral nature he transcends them all, and 
 by virtue of this intellectual and moral nature 
 he takes possession of the globe. He first sees 
 the use of its stored-up treasures. He discovers 
 the light and heat locked up in coal, and re- 
 leases them. He discovers the use of iron, con- 
 verts it into tools, and makes them serve his 
 purpose in manufacture. He learns how to 
 avail himself of the forces of nature, — gravita- 
 tion, light, electricity, heat. The animals that 
 seem to be his superiors are subordinate to 
 him. Some he domesticates, others he con- 
 quers, all he cows and controls. He is the 
 master of the world in which he has been 
 placed. 
 
 Looking upon this process, beginning with the 
 
EVOLUTION AND IMMORTALITY 163 
 
 nebulous condition in the outset, and tracing it 
 gradually until we come to the present condi- 
 tion, two things seem very clear to the theistic 
 evolutionist. First, that there is a design in 
 this creation. It has been governed by a mas- 
 ter will, and guided to a definite and projected 
 end. He perceives that the creative process 
 has gone on by forces, whether from within or 
 without, that were aiming at some ultimate 
 result. He traces the growth of life from the 
 single cell up to the complicated condition of 
 present civilization, and sees that in this de- 
 velopment there has been a culmination which 
 has been steadily sought. He is not so certain 
 as the fathers were about designs, but he is 
 more certain than they were about design. He 
 is not so sure about the adaptations of particular 
 things to particular ends, but he is more certain 
 that the whole process of creation, beginning 
 with the world in its nebulous condition and 
 reaching on to the present, has had a definite 
 purpose which has been consistently pursued. 
 In other words, he sees that the " Infinite and 
 Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed," 
 is an intellectual energy which has thought 
 something out ; a purposeful energy which was 
 resolved to accomplish certain results ; a bene- 
 volent energy which has been seeking the hap- 
 piness and welfare of others. 
 
164 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 This is the first thing the evolutionist sees ; 
 the second is — Man. Though he may be per- 
 plexed in the detail, the evolutionist is sure 
 that the end of this design, the purpose which 
 has been steadily kept in view, is man. What- 
 ever other worlds may be for, whatever the 
 wide universe in its wider scope may be for, 
 this globe on which we dwell has been fashioned, 
 built, constructed, to be the habitation of man. 
 It is man who has taken possession of it ; it is 
 man who understands it ; it is man who is using 
 it; it is man who comprehends its laws, who 
 masters its forces, who avails himself of its 
 riches, who dominates all the other creatures 
 upon it. It is not more certain that the cell is 
 made for the storage of the honey by the bee, 
 that the nest is made for the home of the bird- 
 ling, that the cradle is made for the rocking 
 of the babe, than it is that this globe was 
 made for the habitation and the development of 
 man. 
 
 And man is not only the supreme result of 
 evolution thus far, — he is the final result of 
 evolution ; there is nothing beyond him. If one 
 asks, How do we know that there may not be 
 something inconceivable to us beyond? the an- 
 swer is, We cannot know ; but in our attempt 
 to unriddle the enigma of the universe we must 
 think with our faculties and be governed by 
 
EVOLUTION AND IMMORTALITY 165 
 
 our limitations, and we can conceive nothing 
 higher than man. We can conceive of man 
 infinitely improved ; we can conceive of him 
 cultivated, developed, enlarged, enriched, puri- 
 fied ; but of anything essentially higher than 
 man — no. Nothing can be conceived higher 
 than to think, to will, to love. If we look back 
 along the pages of history, these two truths we 
 have learned from the universe : first, that all 
 its processes have been for the purpose of mani- 
 festing One who thinks, who wills, who loves ; 
 second, that the purpose in the manifestation of 
 this One is the creation of a race of free moral 
 agents, who can themselves think and will and 
 love. The inorganic world existed before the 
 vegetable, and the vegetable world existed be- 
 fore the animal, and the lower animal existed 
 before man, but man exists for nothing beyond. 
 The very topmost round of the ladder has been 
 reached : to know right from wrong, to do the 
 right and eschew the wrong, to understand in- 
 visible distinctions, to perceive the invisible 
 world, to struggle toward something higher and 
 yet higher, and yet always to know, to resolve, 
 to love, — this is supreme. 
 
 And has all been done that thinking and 
 willing and loving may run their insect course 
 in a flitting moment of time, and then end ? Is 
 the whole process of evolution for this, and no- 
 
166 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 thing mpre ? Are we to think that this long cycle 
 of ages has run its course, and chaos has been 
 converted into order, and out of order the archi- 
 tectural splendor of the heavens and earth has 
 been fashioned, and in that architectural splen- 
 dor of the heavens and the earth life has been 
 developed, first in its lower vegetable forms, and 
 then in its intermediary animal forms, and 
 finally out of these the highest conceivable life, 
 the capacity to think, to feel, to will, only that 
 thinking, feeling, willing, may continue for 
 thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty years, and then cease : 
 ages for a lifetime, an eternity for an instant, 
 the whole long process of development culmi- 
 nating in — nothing ? When men believed that 
 God had made by successive creations different 
 beings ; when they believed that He had made 
 the world by one voice, the vegetable world by 
 another, the animal world by another, each spe- 
 cies of animals by a separate voice, and man by 
 a separate voice, one can understand how then 
 men might have said, He has made man for his 
 little day ; man will decay, and God will make 
 others to take his place, — though even then 
 Tennyson's argument was hard for the heart to 
 answer : — 
 
 " Thou wilt not leave us in the dust : 
 
 Thou madest man, he knows not why ; 
 He thinks he was not made to die ; 
 And Thou hast made him : Thou art just." 
 
EVOLUTION AND IMMORTALITY 167 
 
 Even then, if one looked on man and saw how 
 his aspirations and desires reached out into 
 eternity, how he projected himself into eternity, 
 how he set forces to work that were reaching for- 
 ward into the far future, — even then it were diffi- 
 cult to see why it should be thought that " death 
 ends all." But when one believes that the whole 
 creation is focused on man, — that the whole 
 process of the planetary system, beginning so far 
 back that not memory nor even imagination can 
 conceive it, issues in man ; when one believes that 
 the whole process of the long evolution, purposed 
 in the divine love, thought out in the divine 
 mind, and wrought out by divine energy, has 
 been accomplished for the purpose of producing 
 a thinking, willing, loving man, how is it possi- 
 ble for him to believe that the end of it all is 
 — nothing ? 
 
 Let us look at this man a little more closely. 
 He begins in a single cell, and passes through 
 the successive stages of different animals. He 
 is successively reptile, bird, fish, vertebrate mam- 
 mal, and at last becomes man. I do not speak 
 of the race, but of the individual ; he comes into 
 what we call life through these successive stages 
 of previous lives. He is born, dwelling in a 
 body ; and we do not need the scientist to tell 
 us his subsequent history. That process we 
 easily trace in three successive stages. First, this 
 
168 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 body is' the necessary means for his development. 
 He is developed by the body. He learns through 
 the eye and the ear, the hand and the foot, the 
 activities of the physical organization. Is he 
 blind, one element of his development is cut 
 off ; is he deaf, another element ; is he deprived 
 of the sense of touch, a third element. With 
 these all gone some development may be carried 
 on, but, speaking generally, it may be said that 
 the body is necessary to his development. By 
 the very discipline he receives through his body 
 his soul is moulded and shaped. He is educated 
 through the physical organization. Then he 
 comes into the second stage, in which this body 
 becomes the necessary instrument of his activ- 
 ity. It is the power by which he operates on 
 the world without. His lungs, his heart, his 
 stomach, keep the machine in order, while the 
 machine is being used to impart to other lives. 
 Because he has hands which are themselves tools, 
 he makes tools, as no handless animal can. Be- 
 cause he has eyes, he can produce color, which 
 otherwise he could not produce. With his 
 tongue he speaks, and communicates his thoughts 
 to others. With his pen he writes, and commu- 
 nicates his life to other lives. His body is the 
 necessary instrument of his activity, — this is the 
 second stage. Finally, in old age, he comes into 
 the third stage, in which the body becomes a 
 
EVOLUTION AND IMMORTALITY 169 
 
 hindrance to his development. He still has the 
 same power to perceive truth that he always had, 
 but he has become deaf and cannot hear. He 
 has the same artistic sense that he always had, 
 but he has become blind and cannot see. He 
 has the same burning thoughts with which he 
 was wont to inspire audiences, but his voice has 
 lost its music and its power ; he cannot reach 
 the audience. He is still a musician, and the 
 music is in his soul, but the voice is gone ; we 
 want to hear him sing no more. His very brain 
 ceases to formulate thought. His soul has out- 
 grown the body. First it was the instrument 
 for development ; second, an instrument for use- 
 fulness ; now it is neither. He has not grown 
 old, but the organ that he used has grown old. 
 Gladstone is not old. Put him in a new body, 
 — what a magnificent statesman he would be ! 
 Henry Ward Beecher was not old. Bring him 
 back and put him in a body forty years old, — 
 how his eloquence would again stir the heart of 
 the nation ! Men do not grow old ; it is the body 
 which grows old, unable to fulfill its function as 
 the servant of the spirit. 
 
 All through its appointed threescore years 
 and ten the body is dying, — from the very 
 cradle dying ; constantly used up, constantly re- 
 paired. That has been the history year after 
 year, until at last the repair can no longer make 
 
170 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 up for the ravages of time, because the soul has 
 outgrown the body. What then ? Eemember, 
 from the first nebulous days God had in mind a 
 man. Through all the long cycles of geology, 
 through all the cycles of prehistoric history, 
 through all the creative days of the past, through 
 all the later creative days, through family, 
 through various forms of government, through 
 justice and injustice, through war and peace, 
 through commerce, education, and religion, He 
 has been making men. And every man He has 
 put into a body, that at first helped to develop- 
 ment, and then helped to service, and then became 
 a hindrance to development and a hindrance to 
 service, because the soul had outgrown the body. 
 What then? Why, if there is not something 
 that lies beyond when the body is gone, all evo- 
 lution ends in a cul-de-sac. It is inconceivable 
 that God should have spent all the ages in 
 making a Gladstone, a Lincoln, a Jefferson, a 
 Shakespeare, only that He might make a body 
 with which to fill a grave. 
 
 There are two alternatives : that of positivism 
 and that of pantheism. The positivist tells us : 
 Yes, there is an immortality, but it is an immor- 
 tality of influence. Shakespeare is immortal : his 
 plays will live. Plato is immortal : his thoughts 
 will inspire men through all coming ages. Lin- 
 coln is immortal : his courage and his heroism 
 
EVOLUTION AND IMMORTALITY 111 
 
 will make heroes to all future time. The im- 
 mortality is an immortality of influence, and it 
 is for future generations that present generations 
 live. But what is the use of future generations ? 
 Why is there a Shakespeare, a Bacon, a Glad- 
 stone, a Jefferson, a Hamilton, a Washington, a 
 Lincoln ? Only to make insects that dance for 
 an hour in the sunbeam, and then are gone ? I 
 can understand the evolutionist who does not 
 believe in universal immortality, who thinks 
 only the fittest will survive. I can even com- 
 prehend the belief that this present race of men 
 is not worthy to live immortally, that this present 
 race of men will perish, but by and by, when 
 God's providence has worked out its culmination, 
 there will come from them a race that will live 
 immortally, and we are but preparing for them. 
 But I cannot understand how a consistent evolu- \ 
 tionist can believe that " death ends all ; " that „ 
 throughout all these ages God has been prepar- v 
 ing men such as men are, only to make other men , 
 such as these men are, all to fill one great ceme- * 
 tery at the end. As John Fiske says, " God is * 
 not like a child that builds a house of cards to v 
 blow it down again." 1 
 
 1 Dr. Newman Smyth, in a volume published as this vol- 
 ume is undergoing the last preparation for the press, shows 
 from a scientific point of view that death is not the end of life, 
 but life is the end of death. " Man himself might not have 
 been made of the dust of the earth, if that dust had not been 
 
172 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 The other conception is pantheistic. It is the 
 old Hindu conception, repeated in modern the- 
 osophy. All things will run their circuit and 
 come back to God Himself. Man is immortal, 
 but men are not personally immortal. The sun 
 draws the water from the ocean, shapes it in a 
 cloud, hangs it in the heavens, drops it upon the 
 hills ; it falls into the spring and the river, and 
 so flows back again into the ocean. Thus God 
 sends out souls, that, after they have traveled 
 the circuit of their being, they may return to 
 Him again. Such is the pantheistic conception. 
 Are we, then, to think that God has been work- 
 ing through the ages for nothing ; that the end 
 of all His work is simply that He is just where 
 He was before ; that He has struck some sparks 
 out of His heart, which have floated a little 
 while in the universe, and then come back into 
 His heart again ; that He has lived for naught ; 
 that evolution has traveled its circuit, and come 
 back to the cradle from whence it issued ? Nay, 
 more than that; for if this were true, God 
 would not be God. For God is love, and you 
 cannot love if there is not some one to love ; 
 and if God is all, and all things come back to 
 
 mingled of the elements of the dead forms which were before 
 him. We owe our human birth to death in nature. The earth 
 before us has died that we might live. We are the living chil- 
 dren of a world that has died for us." — Dr. Newman Smyth : 
 The Place of Death in Evolution, p. 31 
 
EVOLUTION AND IMMORTALITY 173 
 
 God, — if, as all drops of water return to the 
 great ocean, so all individual souls come back to 
 be absorbed in Him again, — there is no one to 
 love, and God is the loveless one. If " death 
 ends all," either He is a Father who watches an 
 eternal funeral, and all the music of the spheres 
 is but as the music of muffled drums, and the 
 end of all the travail of His soul is death, or else 
 He is a God who does not love, did not love, 
 cannot love, because there are none whom He 
 may love. 
 
 Over against these conceptions I place that 
 of the Christian evolutionist, expressed in the 
 words of Paul, — " The earnest expectation of 
 the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the 
 sons of God." Through all these ages God 
 has been working out something that was worth 
 working out. He has been developing through 
 all these ages sons of God ; creatures that could 
 think as He thinks, will as He wills, love as He 
 loves, and carry their independence and their 
 personality into a future life to love and be 
 loved. As we have seen, according to evolution 
 the creation has always been looking forward 
 to something higher and better. This is that 
 earnest expectation of the creation which Paul 
 interprets. Immortality is not a demonstrated 
 fact, but it is a necessary anticipation. With- 
 out it all evolution would be meaningless. 
 
174 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 The figures of the poets are not merely 
 figures ; they are scientific prophecies. When 
 the integument of the seed ceases to serve the 
 purpose of the seed and keeps the life from 
 growing, the seed becomes a corpse, and out of 
 the dead body there issues the new life. When 
 the egg ceases to be any longer a protection to 
 the bird, and if it were kept intact would be- 
 come a prison-house, forbidding further devel- 
 opment, it is broken, and the bird comes out. 
 When the chrysalis is no longer a protection 
 to the grub, the chrysalis is sloughed off, and 
 the butterfly issues. Man himself was once 
 an egg. Man himself once dwelt in a prison- 
 house of absolute darkness, like the seed in the 
 ground. If he has come from the egg into man- 
 hood, from the dark imprisonment into the light 
 of life, it would be strange, when the body has 
 ceased to fulfill its function, has ceased to be 
 the instrument of life, if he did not cast it off, 
 bury it forever, have no more of it, and rise 
 triumphant to the larger life for which all the 
 evolutionary processes of the centuries have been 
 preparing him. 
 
 More than the ancient conception of creation 
 as an instantaneous process, evolution, as the 
 interpretation of creation, looks forward to a 
 life beyond the grave, and cries with a loud 
 Amen, like the four living creatures in the 
 
EVOLUTION AND IMMORTALITY 175 
 
 Book of Revelation, to the prophetic declara- 
 tion, " The earnest expectation of the creature 
 waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of 
 God." 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 A SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS 
 
 In this chapter I propose to give a brief 
 review of the preceding chapters, and to sum 
 up the conclusions therein reached. 
 
 Evolution is not to be identified with Dar- 
 winism; it is not the doctrine of struggle for 
 existence and the survival of the fittest. Evo- 
 lution is, broadly speaking, the doctrine of 
 growth applied to life; the doctrine that life 
 is a growth ; the doctrine that all life proceeds 
 by natural and normal processes from lower to 
 higher stages, from simpler to more complex 
 stages, and by a vital force or forces operating 
 from without. 
 
 Evolution does not attempt to explain the 
 origin of life. It is simply a history of the pro- 
 cess of life. "With the secret cause of life 
 evolution has nothing to do. A man, there- 
 ' fore, may be a materialistic evolutionist or a 
 / theistic evolutionist ; that is, he may believe 
 that the cause is some single unintelligent, im- 
 personal force, or he may believe that the cause 
 
A SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS 111 
 
 is a wise and beneficent personal God. I repeat 
 what I have already said in this volume, that 
 I am a theistic evolutionist ; that is, I believe 
 that the Infinite and Eternal Energy from 
 which all things proceed, which is the All in 
 all, is an Energy that thinks, feels, and wills, 
 
 — a self-conscious, intelligent, moral Being. 
 Evolution does not claim to be the last word. 
 
 There is no last word. Evolution itself is in- 
 consistent with the idea that there can be any 
 last word. The doctrine of evolution is the -y 
 doctrine of perpetual growth, and therefore 
 every word spoken prepares for another and a 
 further word. If it is to be accepted at all, 
 it is to be accepted as, on the whole, the grand- 
 est generalization of our age, if not of any age, 
 
 — the best statement of the process of life that 
 has yet been uttered. 
 
 All biologists accept evolution ; practically, 
 all natural scientists accept evolution. Le 
 Conte says, " I think truly that you might as 
 well speak of a gravitationist as of an evolution- 
 ist." But that is not all. Evolution is to-day 
 accepted as the clue in their investigations by 
 all teachers, in all departments, in all colleges 
 and institutions of learning, except possibly 
 in the department of theology. History, politi- 
 cal economy, literature, and moral philosophy, 
 no less than the various natural sciences, are 
 
178 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 treated from the evolutionary point of view 
 and according to the principles of evolutionary 
 philosophy. In our colleges and higher institu- 
 tions of learning, of every description, male and 
 female, orthodox and unorthodox, the courses 
 of education are founded on the assumption 
 that the history of life is a history of growth 
 from lower to higher forms, from simpler to 
 more complex forms, according to laws that are 
 comprehensible, and by forces resident within 
 the phenomena themselves. In this condition 
 of learning there are three courses which the 
 religious teacher may take. The first course 
 is for him to set himself in antagonism to evolu- 
 tion. He may enter upon the biological field ; 
 he may point out gaps here and there in the 
 process, and may show that evolution does not 
 explain everything : and thus he may satisfy 
 himself, and perhaps those of his congregation 
 who have not studied the subject, that the hy- 
 pothesis of evolution is untrue ; but it must be 
 frankly said, he will satisfy no one else. When 
 the whole scientific and intellectual world is 
 moving in one direction, the minister who is not 
 a scientific expert may get himself run over, 
 but he cannot stop the procession by getting in 
 front of it. The second course is for the reli- 
 gious teacher to maintain that there is a differ- 
 ence between the spiritual realm and the natural 
 
A SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS 179 
 
 realm. Conceding that it is true that evolution 
 is the law of the natural realm, he may insist 
 that there is some other law which operates in 
 the spiritual realm, or at all events that the law 
 of growth does not operate with uniformity. 
 Conceding that there are no interferences, no 
 breaks, in the continuity of cause and effect 
 in nature, he may insist that there are interven- 
 tions in the continuity of cause and effect in the 
 moral and spiritual realm. There is some rea- 
 son for thus differentiating the moral and the 
 material realms ; one may do this and be ra- 
 tional and self-consistent. And yet it seems to 
 me that, if we believe that there is one God — 
 God of the physical and material nature, God of 
 the spiritual and intellectual nature — we shall 
 be more and more inclined to believe that His 
 method of work in the world is one ; that He 
 does not proceed in the two realms by methods 
 which are themselves inconsistent. The third 
 course is for the religious teacher frankly to 
 accept evolution ; to say to the scientist, Since 
 you have studied this subject and this is your 
 verdict, I accept it, and I will see what light 
 is thrown upon the problems of the moral life. 
 In so doing, he seems to me to have the author- 
 ity of the Master. " And He [Jesus] said, So 
 is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast 
 seed into the ground ; and should sleep, and rise 
 
180 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 night and day, and the seed should spring and 
 grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth 
 bringeth forth fruit of herself ; first the blade, 
 then the ear, after that the full corn in the 
 ear." 1 In this parable Christ not only implies 
 that there is a true analogy between " God's 
 way of doing things " in the spiritual and in the 
 material realm, but He anticipates Le Conte's 
 definition of evolution, and applies its three 
 principles to the spiritual realm : first, " contin- 
 uous progressive change," — first the blade, then 
 the ear, then the full corn in the ear ; second, 
 " according to certain laws," — it springs and 
 grows up ; third, " by means of resident forces," 
 — the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself. 
 
 I believe, then, that the great laws of life 
 which natural science has elucidated from a 
 study of natural phenomena are analogous to, if 
 not identical with, the laws of the spiritual life, 
 and that the latter are to be interpreted by the 
 former. The object of this book is to afford 
 some aid to the perplexed by throwing upon 
 the mystery of the spiritual life the light which 
 the philosophy of evolution has already thrown 
 upon the material life. This may revolutionize 
 theology, but it will strengthen and enrich re- 
 ligious faith. [ For there is a great difference 
 between theology and religion. Keligion is a 
 
 i Mark iv. 26-28. 
 
A SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS 181 
 
 spiritual life ; theology is the science of that 
 life. It is very important that we should have 
 a correct science of life, but it is also very im- 
 portant that we should understand that the sci- 
 ence is not the life. The life remains essentially 
 unchanged through centuries, but the science 
 is continually changing. The religious life of 
 faith and hope and love is, in its essential ele- 
 ments, what it was when Abraham turned his 
 back upon idolatry that he might go out in 
 quest of the true God ; but the theology of the 
 most conservative orthodox church in America 
 is very different from the theology of Abraham. 
 What is religion ? If we ask the Bible for defi- 
 nitions, we shall find such as this : " What doth ^ 
 the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to 
 love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" 
 Then religion is justice, mercy, humility. Or / 
 such as this : " The grace of God . . . hath / 
 appeared . . . teaching us that ... we should 
 live soberly, righteously, and godly in this pre- 
 sent world, looking f or . . . the glorious appear- 
 ing of the great God and our Saviour." Then ^ 
 religion is sobriety or self-control, righteousness 
 or dealing rightly with our fellow men, godliness 
 or reverence for God, and hope or aspiration for 
 a nobler and diviner life. Or such as this 
 " Pure religion and undefiled before God and 
 the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and 
 
182 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 widows in their affliction, and to keep himself 
 unspotted from the world." Then religion is 
 purity and philanthropy. Or such as this : 
 "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all 
 thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy 
 might ; . . . and thou shalt love thy neighbour 
 as thyself." Then true religio n is love toward 
 God and,lQvetoward-man. These and kindred 
 definitions scattered through the Bible make it 
 clear that, according to the Bible writers, reli- 
 gion is not a system of thought, a kind of ritual, 
 or a church order, but a spiritual life. It is re- 
 verence toward God, the Father of all the living; 
 repentance for sin and a turning away from it 
 because it is loathsome to the soul ; finding in 
 the spiritual experience of other men something 
 to which the soul answers and responds, and, 
 preeminently, finding inspiration from the Bible 
 as a book of spiritual experiences ; seeing in 
 Christ one worthy to follow, and having that 
 kind of faith in Him which leads one to become 
 a follower of Him ; coming into fellowship with 
 God, walking with Him, having His companion- 
 ship, recognizing Him as a friend, living in His 
 household as a child ; feeling in one's self a cer- 
 tain quality that cannot die, and, because of that 
 intense consciousness of undying quality, look- 
 ing forward with hope beyond the grave for 
 one's self and for one's loved ones. This is 
 
'^[summary of conclusions 183 
 
 religion. It is the function of theology to give 
 us such definition of God as it can ; but the re- 
 verence comes first, and the definition afterward. 
 It is the function of theology to define sin, and 
 to tell us, if it can, how it came into the world ; 
 but the soul is first to turn with loathing from 
 whatever it knows to be wrong, without waiting 
 for definitions. It is the function of theology to 
 explain, if it can, how it is that the Bible has 
 been so preeminent in the history of the world, 
 carrying with it everywhere the light of a nobler 
 and diviner civilization ; but before that comes 
 the answer of the human soul to the noble and 
 inspiring words which the Bible utters. It is 
 the function of theology to define, if it can, 
 Christ's place in human history ; but before that, 
 comes the spirit which bows before Him, reveres 
 Him, loves Him, follows Him. It is the func- 
 tion of theology to interpret, if it can, how sinful 
 man can come into fellowship with an infinite 
 and holy God ; but not until man has come into 
 that fellowship can he define the coming. It is 
 the function of theology to explain, if it can, 
 how it is that the soul can go on in another life 
 when this body has mingled with the common 
 dust ; but before it can explain that phenome- 
 non, the soul itself must be conscious of its 
 immortal life and feel the divine and endless 
 life within. My object, then, is not to make 
 
 v 
 

 184 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 the reader an evolutionist ; it is not even to 
 revolutionize his theology ; it is to show those 
 who are perplexed by doubt, whose minds have 
 seized upon evolution as a clue to the mystery 
 of life, and to whom that clue seems inconsist- 
 ent with the religious teaching to which they 
 have been accustomed, that by a change in the- 
 ology they may hold fast their faith in God, 
 their consciousness of sin, their fellowship with 
 Christ, their experience of pardon, their hope of 
 VV eternal life. 
 
 The theistic evolutionist believes in God, and 
 in a personal God, — that is, he believes in a 
 God who thinks and feels and wills ; but he does 
 not believe in an embodied King, sitting on a 
 great white throne, remote, inaccessible, a God 
 afar off. , He believes that God is truly in the 
 universe, and manifests Himself through all the 
 v multifarious forces of nature ; that what we call 
 ; laws of nature are the laws of God's own being ; 
 that the activities of nature are the methods of 
 the divine; that God works out the creation 
 from within, thus revealing Himself by the con- 
 tinual forthputting of His wisdom and His 
 power. He thinks, therefore, that every day is 
 a creative day ; that every spring God says 
 again, " Let there be light," and light comes 
 back to flood the world ; that every spring He 
 again carpets the earth with grass, and brings 
 
 / 
 
A SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS 185 
 
 forth living creatures to inhabit the ocean, the 
 earth, and the air ; that God always has been, is, 
 and always will be, a speaking, working, reveal- 
 ing, disclosing God. This theology does not 
 remove God further from him; it brings Him 
 nearer. The evolutionist believes that in this 
 process of self-manifestation God has wrought 
 man, and that, so far as we know, man is the 
 supreme fruit of God's creation, — certainly the 
 supremest work yet wrought in the history of this 
 globe. He believes that man is the product of 
 that process which is at once evolution and divine 
 manifestation, for all growth is the manifestation { 
 of God's own activity. He believes that man is I 
 God's own son, but God's son in the making. 
 He looks upon the world as the factory where 
 this making is going on ; it is full of dust and 
 chips, and the statues are none of them fin- 
 ished. He sees man emerging from the animal 
 condition, — half man, half animal. In Cole's 
 picture of the expulsion from the garden, a great 
 wall divides between the garden and the wilder- 
 ness, — all flowers and fruits within, all weeds 
 and thistles without. The evolutionist sees no 
 such sharp line : the wilderness makes its incur- 
 sion into the garden, and the garden makes its 
 incursion into the wilderness, and the world is 
 made up of tares and wheat growing together, 
 in society, in the church, in every individual, — 
 
186 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 each one of us part tare, part wheat ; no man 
 so good that there is not some evil left in him, 
 no man so evil that there is not some seed of 
 good in him. He believes that sin enters every 
 human life, and the individual "falls" when 
 the animal nature predominates over the spirit- 
 ual. He does not look back six thousand years 
 for a first sin. He does not throw the responsi- 
 bility of the transgression off upon poor, blun- 
 dering, sinful Adam ; he recognizes that he 
 himself is carrying around the elements of a 
 sinful nature in himself. He reads again the 
 seventh chapter of Romans, and cries out with 
 Paul, In me — that is, in my flesh — I see no 
 good thing. This does not and will not make 
 sin seem less real, less awful, nor will it make 
 penitence less real, less sincere, less deep. The 
 evolutionist believes that God, who is the source 
 of all life, who is the one universal force, who 
 dwells in all nature, is brooding the human race. 
 He is the Father and the Mother of humanity. 
 Inspiration is the inbreathing of God, and God 
 breathes on all the souls He has ever made. 
 He is the Light that lighteth every man that 
 cometh into the world. There are two concep- 
 tions of pagan religion : one which regards all 
 pagan religions as the product of priestcraft, 
 devised by wicked men to get innocent men in 
 their power, — the fruits and products of the 
 
A SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS 187 
 
 devil ; the other, which regards all religions as 
 the reaching out of hands to God, the aspiration 
 of ignorant and blinded souls for their Father. 
 This is the belief of the evolutionist. This was 
 the teaching of Paul, who, standing on Mars' 
 Hill, and looking upon a city in which, an ancient 
 satirist tells us, it is easier to find a god than a 
 man, said to the assembled multitude, "Your 
 own poets have borne witness that you are God's 
 offspring ; these idols are themselves evidences 
 that you are searching after a God whom you 
 do not know, and whom I have come to declare 
 unto you." But though inspiration is as uni- 
 versal as the race, there is one people which has 
 responded more quickly, answered more readily, 
 and seen more clearly than any other, and the 
 selected literature of that Hebrew race speaks 
 with a power of inspiration with which no other 
 literature speaks. How, then, does the inspira- 
 tion of the Bible differ from the inspiration, we 
 will say, of the sacred book of the Hindus? 
 How it differs in process we do not know. How 
 it differs in result we clearly see. Drop a peach- 
 pit and an apple-seed in the ground : from one 
 comes a peach, from the other an apple. What 
 is the process that makes of one a peach-tree, of 
 the other an apple-tree ? No one knows. But 
 no one thinks of saying the apple is a peach. 
 The evolutionist believes that God, who has 
 
188 AN EVOLUTIONISTS THEOLOGY 
 
 always been inspiring the human race, and 
 always unveiling Himself to earnest human 
 souls, when the human race had reached that 
 stage of development in which it was possible 
 for God to appear in a human life, and not be 
 grossly and hopelessly misunderstood, did appear 
 in a human life, that He might make perfect 
 that revelation of Himself which He had been 
 carrying on from the beginning. The contro- 
 versy, more than a hundred years ago, in New 
 England, between the Unitarian and the Ortho- 
 dox turned on the nature of Christ. The Uni- 
 tarian said, " He is not God, He is man ; " the 
 Orthodox said, " He is not man, He is God." 
 Both seemed to agree that there was a clear an- 
 tithesis between God and man; and that He 
 could not be God if He were man, nor man if 
 He were God. But the fundamental teaching 
 of the Hebrew prophets from the beginning is 
 this: that God made man in his own image. 
 The difference between man and God is two- 
 fold : God is holy, man is sinful ; God is infi- 
 nite, man is finite. Conceive of a man who is 
 perfectly holy, and he would be the image of 
 God. Conceive of God coming into life and 
 taking on finite proportions, and He would be 
 a perfect man. For the difference between God 
 and man is a difference not in essential nature. 
 It is the fundamental teaching of the Bible that 
 
A SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS 189 
 
 in their essential nature they are the same. The 
 evolutionist, therefore, thinks of Christ, not as 
 a strange, inexplicable God-man who was neither 
 God nor man, not as a being who went through 
 life doing some things as God and some things as 
 man, but as God in man, God so perfectly pos- 
 sessing one unique human soul that in that soul 
 we see reflected at once the image of God and 
 the perfection of manhood. Christ is God mani- 
 fest in the flesh ; that is, such a manifestation of 
 God as is possible in a human life. 
 
 The evolutionist thinks that the object of 
 Christ's coming into the world is, not to release 
 men from punishment, but to cleanse and pu- 
 rify them from sin. There is not to be found in 
 either the Old Testament or the New Testament 
 a single text which connects sacrifice in the one 
 case or the suffering and passion of Christ in the 
 other with the remission of punishment. The 
 word " punishment " and the word " sacrifice " 
 are not to he found so collated as to indicate 
 that the sacrifice took the place of the penalty. 
 Sacrifice is connected always with the remission 
 of sin and the giving of new life. There is no 
 way by which life can be quickened save by the 
 imparting of life. Struggle for others is as 
 integral a part of the doctrine of evolution as 
 struggle for one's self. Sacrifice is the condi- 
 tion of life-giving. 
 
190 AN EVOLUTIONIST'S THEOLOGY 
 
 / The evolutionist, then, believes in God as the 
 creator of the world, but God dwelling in the 
 world and speaking through all its phenomena. 
 He believes in sin as a violation of God's law ; 
 not of some edict issued by God at some remote 
 time in history, but of the law of nature, and 
 therefore of the law of God, and therefore of 
 the law of man's own being. He believes in 
 inspiration as a universal factor in human his- 
 tory, coming to its culmination in the literature 
 of the Hebrew race. He believes in revelation ; 
 that is, in the unveiling of God to man, a grad- 
 ual unveiling wrought in human experience, 
 through the seers and prophets of all ages, but 
 preeminently in Jesus Christ, God's well-beloved 
 Son. He believes in Incarnation ; that is, in 
 the indwelling of God in his children, of which 
 Incarnation the type and pattern is seen in Him 
 who is at once the manifestation of God to man 
 and the revelation to men of what humanity is 
 to be when God's work in the world is done, — 
 perfect God and perfect man, because God per- 
 fectly dwelling in a perfect man. He believes in 
 atonement ; that is, in a true reconciliation be- 
 tween God and man, making them at one through 
 the Incarnation and Passion of Jesus Christ, 
 who lived and suffered, not to relieve men from 
 future torment, but to purify and perfect them 
 in God's likeness by uniting them to God. He 
 
A SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS 191 
 
 believes in sacrifice, not as a penalty borne by 
 an innocent Sufferer for guilty man, — a doc- 
 trine for which he can find no authority, either 
 in Scripture or in life, — but as a laying down of 
 one's life in love that another may receive life. 
 He believes in redemption, not as a restoration 
 to a lost state of innocence, impossible to be 
 restored, but as a culmination of the long pro- 
 cess when man shall be presented before his 
 Father without spot or wrinkle or blemish or 
 any such thing. He believes, not in propitiation 
 of an angry God by Another suffering to ap- 
 pease the Father's wrath, but in the perpetual 
 self -propitiation of the Father, whose mercy, go- 
 ing forth to redeem from sin, satisfies, as nothing 
 else could, the divine indignation against sin, by 
 abolishing it. He believes in immortality, not 
 as a mere endless existence, but as an undying 
 nature, which is superior to death, because it 
 shares with God, its Kedeemer, the power of an 
 endless life. And he believes in religion, not as 
 a creed, a ritual, or a church order, which are at 
 best but the instruments of religion, but as self- 
 control, righteousness, reverence, hope, love, — 
 the life of God in the soul of man. 
 
 fuNIVERSlTYl 
 
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CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, U. S. A. 
 
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