simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher. The organs of different animals were not given them at first as they are, but were developed by necessity and strengthened by use. According to this we are not to say, for example, that the trunk of an elephant was given to him for its present manifold and delicate uses, any more than we are to suppose that the proboscis of the bee was formed on purpose to suck honey, or that wings were made to fly with, fins to swim with, or eyes and ears for seeing and hearing. Development has begotten use, and use in its turn by the advantage it gave in the struggle for life has produced farther development. The principle is that all living things have a latent capacity for variation. We can see that the offspring of any plant or animal may vary from its parents in slight yet important points. These variations may be either to its advantage or disadvantage in the battle of life. If to its disadvantage it is pushed aside and the stronger wins the day. If to its advantage it becomes stronger on the ground, and hands down its peculiarities to its offspring. Thus in the struggle for existence which is going on all round, the strongest lives, the weakest dies, and you have what is called the survival of the fittest. According to this view there is a sort of force always working up to higher things. As Mr. Darwin says— "As man can produce, and certainly has produced, a great result by his methodical and conscious means of selection, what may not nature effect?" Given time long enough and favouring circumstances, what limit can be set to this process? The process itself is slow, but time is long. Once set going, with unnumbered ages of ages to work in, why should it not forge link by link the whole living chain from a cell up to a fish, and from a fish up to a man?

Such, briefly put, is the theory, and let me say frankly that notwithstanding the objectionable uses which some men have made of it, whether true or not, there is no necessary opposition between it and the Bible-no implicit contradiction

between Evolution and a Final Cause. All depends upon how it is understood. If it is merely made to assert that forms of life have been gradually produced, it may be opposed to what are called in geology and zoology special or local creations, but it has nothing to allege against an Intelligent Cause of the universe, or against the existence of finality in nature. Special creations are one manner of conceiving the creative action, Evolution is another, but one demands a great First Cause just as much as the other. Though it is very difficult to reconcile it with much else that he has written, even Herbert Spencer has said "The genesis of an atom is no easier to conceive than that of a planet. Indeed, far from rendering the universe less mysterious than before, it makes a much greater mystery of it. Creation by fabrication is much lower than creation by Evolution. A man can bring a machine together; he cannot make a machine that develops itself." These words are so true that one cannot but regret their writer should have so seriously forgotten them. They put in another way what Charles Kingsley said about Darwin's book long ago. He said that it "only showed the truth of Christ's words-'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' We knew of old that God was so wise that He could make all things: but, behold, He is so much wiser than even that, that He can make all things make themselves."

If by Evolution, then, is merely meant the method which Divine Intelligence has pursued, the theory may have to undergo some modifications as our knowledge increases, but on religious grounds no man need take exception to it. If it be admitted that the intelligence of God has ordered and still orders the universe, that the will of God was and still is the pervading force, and that Evolution is merely the coming forth of divine thought and will, the incomplete and never-to-be-completed history of the self-revelation of God, then the Bible and modern science have no controversy between them.

But it is useless to hide from ourselves the fact that this is not the meaning attached to the word by the leading exponents of Evolution. In the case of some of them their utterances are widely different at different times, and sorely perplexing. Darwin, in the very last edition of his work on the Origin of Species, thus concludes:-"There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms, or into one of them, while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity; from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved." If life with its several powers was thus, as he says, breathed by the Creator Himself, there is nothing in the theory thus far to conflict with Scripture which says that God created life without saying how He created it. But unfortunately there are so many other things in his writings which seem to imply a blind force in nature rather than a creative Intelligence. Tyndall, again, seems at times to fall in with the idea of a personal Creator, and yet again he defines matter as "that mysterious thing by which all this has been accomplished," that is, the whole series of phenomena, from the evaporation of water to the self-conscious life of man. He says, also, that this same matter carries in it "the promise and potency of all terrestrial life." This comes perilously near to that fundamental proposition of materialism in all its forms, ancient and modern, which asserts that "the universe consists of atoms and empty space." Other writers, like Spencer, and Clifford, and Haeckel, are more explicit and outspoken still. Herbert Spencer puts forward ideas about the chance origin of things which would be simply laughed at by men of common sense if they had been clothed in less elaborate and apparently learned language. The eye, for example, has always been set forth, and rightly so, as a marvellous instrument showing a clear design in the Maker. Newton asked-"Could He who made the eye have been

ignorant of the laws of optics?" But according to Spencer the formation of the eye was the merest accident. For some chemical reason or other, a part of the skin of some creature of very low organisation became more sensitive to light than the rest of its body. And "then when there comes to be a specially sensitive spot, anything which casts a shadow on that spot alone, produces an internal change." That internal change becomes more and more marked till at length at the sensitive spot there appears an eye. We are thus asked to believe that this wonderful instrument with all its marvellous combinations of an external transparency and internal camera, with a series of lenses in the right place, and a retina also in the right place, and a sensitive nerve to transmit the images formed by the retina, all came haphazard and without a final end, through the chemical action of light on a "specially sensitive spot." Improbabilities apart, it may be sufficient to mention the simple fact that the trilobite is one of the oldest of the fossil forms, that it appears suddenly in the geologic record, and that its eye is perfect from the first. I am afraid all this learned theorizing on the part of Mr. Spencer must be regarded as nonsense, in spite of the elaborate terminology, so dear to his heart, in which he works it out. Yet it is not unfair to put it forward as an illustration of the thinkings of the extreme left of the Evolutionist school. They hold that the force working upward and making perpetual changes in structure, is a mere blind force in matter, and not a personal Creator; a mere blind force always acting without definite purpose, and yet, curiously enough, always issuing in a world of order and harmony. They hold that man himself has no exceptional position necessarily, that he was developed from animals in the same way as other animals through countless ages, that his mind and conscience are in no sense a witness to the intelligence and righteousness of the Creator in whose image he was made, but have been

developed in the same way as the organs of the body, as a mere matter of convenience.

It is manifest that if Evolution means this—if it means a blind unconscious cause producing all we see, and not a mere mode of working on the part of an intelligent Creator, the acceptance of it as a theory of life is fatal, not merely to a belief in the Bible, but what is of more consequence still, fatal to all faith in a personal God. This is a serious matter, and in the case of not a few has, I fear, already wrought out serious consequences. Let us try to look at it as grave and earnest men should.

First. Even accepting Evolution as a mode of working on the part of the Creator there seem to be fixed and serious barriers in nature to the development of species by natural selection. It should be borne in mind that the most striking cases usually brought forward to show that by crossing and selection you can make a change for the better in plants and animals, are just those cases where man has interfered, not those where nature has carried on her changes alone. And even here it must not be forgotten that though important results have been produced by domestication, we have never yet produced a single organ which was not there before. We have improved, but we have not created. Because when an organ has been given you can strengthen and develope it by exercise, must we infer that need can produce an organ which does not exist? The acrobat has suppler limbs than other men, but not more limbs than they, nor differently arranged. But passing this by, what man does with animals by artificial selection is not the question. It is not what man has done artificially, but what nature, left to herself, has accomplished, that we have to do with. And even in those cases where man has interfered and brought about certain changes, it is an admitted fact that when his improved birds, or plants, or animals are left to themselves, they always revert to the original type. Darwin has shown, for example,