days we have heard an Anglican bishop, in an important ecclesiastical assembly, eulogizing Charles Darwin as a thinker who had rendered high service to theology by his famous theory.
"Per varies casus, per tot discrimina rerum."
The doctrine of the immediate creation of man was much more distinctly taught in Genesis, and has, therefore, been defended with a greater tenacity by theologians. Even here, however, time has brought about a general acceptance of the scientific theory. Many of the arguments which established the law of evolution in the animal world retain their force in application to man. Thus there are certain rudimentary organs found in the human organism (such as the appendix vermiformis and the glandula pinealis), and a number of atrophied muscles, which very clearly point to a pre-human ancestry; they are certainly unintelligible if we suppose the actual organism to be a divine chef d'oevre. The development of the impregnated human ovulum also follows the same course as that of the higher animals; it is a recapitulation of the course of the evolution of the animal kingdom. The evidence of ethnology, too, entirely points towards a continuity of development between anthropoid animals and the earliest men. Such facts, added to the natural presumption of man's origin, which is grounded on the already-proved universality of evolution, fully establish the theory of human evolution from a scientific point of view. Again, therefore, there has been a reform in hermeneutics, and it is generally admitted that Scripture places no obstacle in the way. The only serious opposition now is based on the wide psychological gulf which separates man from the "lower" animals; hence there is a tendency to admit that the body of man is the product of evolution, but the soul an immediate creation. Since, however, the systems of philosophy which are at present in vogue give little support (as we have seen) to the theory of a distinct and separate spiritual substance in man, the complete doctrine of man's evolution is now generally accepted as it is taught by the Rationalists.
With this controversy is naturally connected the question of the antiquity of the human race, on which also theologians have waged zealous war with ethnologists, archaeo-
