the modern atheist as his ally. They are at least traveling both together on the high-road which leads from a destructive nihilism toward a constructive religion. Only the atheist has thought it his duty to go back again to the beginning, and to measure industriously the same ground that the Church had gone over just two thousand four hundred years ago, when the great "Something is" addressed itself to man through Moses in the word "I am," or Jehovah (יהוה, Absolute Existence).[1]
But perhaps the pure logician may attempt another reply. Finding us not in the least disconcerted by hearing, once again, the familiar truth that all our faculties are limited, he may attempt to shatter our serenity by an announcement of a more novel kind. He may say: Not only is the imagery with which you clothe, represent, and conceive the Self-existent merely relative and human, but—far more damning fact—it is all a development. It has all grown with the growth of your race. Environment and heredity have supplied you with all your forms of thought. Even your "conscience is nothing more than an organized body of certain psychological elements which, by long inheritance, have come to inform us by way of intuitive feeling how we should act for the benefit of society."[2]
Be it so. The proof has not yet been made out. But since these evolution doctrines are (as Dr. Newman would say) "in the air," it is more consonant to the ruling ideas which at present dominate our imagination to conceive things in this way. Indeed, to a large and increasing number of Churchmen the evolution hypothesis appears, not only profoundly interesting, but probably true. They find there nothing to shake their faith, and a good deal to confirm it. Man is what he is, in whatever way he may have become so. And how atheists can persuade themselves that this beautiful theory of the divine method helps their denial of a deity, the modern school of theologians is at a loss to understand. For the cosmic force whom Christians worship has, from the very beginning, been represented to them, not as a fickle, but as a continuous and a law-abiding energy. "My Father worketh hitherto," said Christ. "Not a sparrow falleth to the ground" without his cognizance. "The very hairs of your head are all numbered." "In Him we live and move and have our being." Pictorial expressions, no doubt. But what words could more clearly indicate the unbroken continuity of causation in nature than these texts from the Christian Scriptures? And it is surely the establishment of a continuous, as distinct from an intermittent, agency in nature which forms the leading point of interest both to science and to the Church, at the present day, as against a shallow deism. If, therefore, man's imaginative and moral faculties, as we know them now, are a development from former and lower—yes, even from savage, from bestial, from material—antecedents, what is that to us? Of man's logical powers the self-same thing has to be said. Why,
