The gradualness of the process is really the one marvel, yet because of this there is thought by some to be no marvel at all. If an animal were suddenly to appear of a form entirely new there would be no manner of doubt that there had been a presiding mind in its creation. But suppose that the animal before us is nothing but a new form given to a pre-existing animal in virtue of a certain law of transformation with which we are familiar. The physical cause then seems to be sufficient to explain the effect. Suppose we ascend from this second animal to a third, and from this third to a fourth, and so on. At each step we still seem to find a sufficient cause for the effect. But at last we must come back to the smallest point of life somewhere. That could not come from dead matter. It may be said the cause of life is purely and simply the unknown. But known or unknown there is a cause beyond matter, and we must pass beyond the merely physical. The physical causes no doubt are sufficient in a certain sense just as the axe is sufficient to cut down the tree; but surely the arm of the striker counts for something. It has been well pointed out that the farther one ascends from cause to cause, reducing step by step the number of the physical agents, it will become the more difficult to explain the multiplicity of agreements and the infinite complication of the results. As Janet says"If I take from a bag five letters which I know form a word, it will be a great chance, if, letting them fall one after the other I succeed in forming that word; and a much greater still, if, taking letters haphazard from an alphabet I were to make a verse or a poem. What then would it be if I made a machine capable of producing without end poems and treatises of science and philosophy? But a brain is such a machine. If now this machine were itself the product of another machine called an organism, and this organism the product of that still vaster organism called a species, and the species the product of that superior organism called the animal kingdom, and so on, it is evident that in proportion

as we simplify causes in a physical point of view, the more we increase in a moral point of view the abyss that existed before between a physical cause and a regulated effect. There is a disproportion between cause and effect. The disproportion is intellectual, not physical, because matter attains to the realization of something intelligible, to which it has no tendency in its own nature."

Thus we keep returning to the same point for the simple reason that all lines of thought closely followed lead to the conclusion that Evolution of itself can no more explain by purely physical causes the order of the universe than any other mechanical system. It simply reduces everything to the laws of motion, whereas the laws of motion by themselves would not produce one form rather than another. Matter remains matter still, and force merely what it was before the cause of motion, and neither matter nor force have in themselves alone the principle of a rational development. This which seems so obvious when one puts it into words, is too much ignored by the extreme thinkers of the school I have been dealing with. They seem to assume that mere force set working anyhow will issue in orderly and intelligent results of itself. Mr. Darwin surely has never realised what an opening there is in the joints of his armour when he passes from artificial to natural selection. He shows that by carefully choosing his combinations man attains certain desired ends, and gives his stock or his birds special characteristics. Then without at all realizing the vast step he has taken, he quietly assumes that blind nature acting without design and without direction will bring about the same results as intelligent man acting from very distinct design. We have a choice and a chooser in the one instance; are the cases parallel without a choice and a chooser in the other?

Turn the question about as we will we want something more to account for a wondrous world like this than mere matter and force. Plainly there are ends aimed at by all the

complex combinations at work, and there must be One who aims. The thing thought is not that which thinks. The Thinker is separate. Mere indeterminate tendencies at work would not lead to one effect more than another; there must have been distinct ideas where there are distinct effects produced; where there are distinct ideas there must be intelligence; and where there is intelligence there must be consciousness, for what do we know of intelligence apart from consciousness? Our reason as well as our faith leads us up to Him who is the Fountain of Life. Of Him are all things, and to Him are all things. He had for an end in creation that nature whose end shall be Himself. The terminus of the divine action is nature; the terminus of nature is God.

And now here for the present I leave the matter. I have tried to show-I think I have shown-that mere development by natural selection, even it could account for the structure of the individual plant or animal, cannot account for adaptations in so many independent directions. Whatever truth there is in the theory, and within the limits prescribed undoubted truth there is, it cannot be what some would make it, a complete theory of the universe. It is time to clear away the mists and ask plainly what is meant. If Evolution means that, according to the ancient faith, an All-wise, Almighty, and All-loving Father is the Maker of life and acts according to certain laws which are the expression of His will, at once we say that Evolution is part of the truth of the universe. But if by this theory is meant, as certainly some do mean, that there is no personal Ruler in nature, but only a blind unintelligent force working up from lower forms to higher, that there is no such thing as moral responsibility to the Supreme, that conscience or the moral sense has only been developed out of the uses of life, and has no higher origin, then we shall not be deterred by all the great names which support the theory from saying that it is as unscientific as it is unscriptural. Science is one thing

and romance is another this is romance, not science. Science is the sum of all that which is known, not a convenient name for mere guesses and speculations.

I have pointed out what seem to me not mere difficulties of detail, but difficulties which go to the very heart of the extreme Evolutionist theory, and are fundamental. Till these difficulties are met it is idle to tell us we are resisting science when we decline to follow what are mere imaginative speculations. Till they are met I for one shall still cling to the belief that I am the offspring of God, that I have a living, loving, personal Father, and I shall try to get my brethren to do the same.

VII.

THE BIBLE AND THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.

WHEN the Hebrew poet looked up into the heavens on some starlit night and felt in his soul the stately order and far-reaching vastness of worlds on worlds, the greatness of nature brought home to him the seeming littleness of man— "Lord, what is man, that Thou art mindful of him? or the son of man, that Thou visitest him?" We have much the same feeling when we look at the earth beneath as when we look at the heavens above. As we turn over the record of the rocks and try to realise the long reach of ages in which the gigantic forces of nature have been at work; as we behold the earth the work of God's hands, the innumerable forms of life which He has ordained, we ask with the Hebrew "Lord, what is man, that thou art mindful of him? or the son of man, that Thou visitest him?"

Yet rightly looked at, the long story of the rocks is not so much a testimony to man's littleness as to his greatness. For he is the key to it all. All that went before was meant

to prepare the way for man. These vast geologic periods

which overwhelm the imagination, these stupendous forces of flood and fire, of subsidence and upheaval, this long succession of life rising at every step to nobler form, reach their crown and consummation in man. Till he appeared, Nature with all her wonders was but as a kingdom without a king; an estate without an owner to develope its resources; a beautiful vision without an interpreter to reveal its meaning.