Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/342

outside of it; and in this aspect he is the very type and image of the supernatural.^[1]

By Nature we understand all visible things, including man so far as he can be observed by the naked eye or the microscope—his morphology, his physiology, his histological development. But for a Christian this does not exhaust human nature. For him visible Nature is the segment of a circle, "we see but in part." And the visible is not coextensive with the known. Bather the ultimate explanation of "the things which are seen" is to be sought in "the things which are not seen." There are forces which refuse to be measured by "foot-pounds," facts which forever must escape the microscope, realities which cast no bands upon the spectrum field, a life which the scalpel can neither discover nor destroy, A Christian believes with Mr. Darwin "that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is," and finds it "an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress";^[2] but he holds it in a different way and on different grounds. And, believing in the truth of man's divine nature, he can watch without anxiety, not without interest and gratitude, the work of those who are showing us man's place in the physical world. Darwin tells us that, as he lay on the grass on an April morning at Moor Park, amid the joy of opening spring-tide, he "did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed."^[3] Amid the supreme realities of the moral and spiritual world, or in the devotional study of the Word of God, it becomes a matter of relative unimportance to a Christian whether he is to trace his pedigree back directly or indirectly to the dust. For it is God's world after all. We believe in the resurrection of the body as well as the immortality of the soul. That which is material is not "common or unclean":

What we are [says Kingsley], we are by the grace of God. . . . Saint Francis called the birds his brothers. Whether he was correct, either theologically or zoologically, he was plainly free from that fear of being mistaken for an ape, which haunts so many in these modern times. Perfectly sure that he himself was a spiritual being, he thought it at least possible that birds might be spiritual beings likewise, incarnate like himself in mortal flesh; and saw no degradation to the dignity of human nature in claiming kindred lovingly with creatures so beautiful, so wonderful, who (as he fancied in his old-fashioned way) praised God in the forest, even as angels did in heaven.^[4]

With regard to all this higher side of man's nature, Mr. Darwin was an agnostic. He uses the word more than once of himself, and yet, with that transparent honesty which characterizes all that he did, he admits the difficulty as well as the unsatisfactoriness

1. "Unity of Nature," p. 308.
2. i, p. 282.
3. i, p. 471.
4. "Prose Idylls," pp. 24, 25.