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OUR HEREDITY FROM GOD.

PART FIRST.

LECTURE I.

THE PROBLEM STATED.

THE investigations of Nature during the last half century have not only shaken the belief of the reading public in the theological explanation of the world and life and man and history, but have placed preachers of current theology in a situation of peculiar embarrassment. We find our old views, based on the theory of an Adam created by a personal extra-natural Deity, confronted by an antagonistic theory that professes to account for the world, for all living forms, and for man himself, by natural life-evolution. By this new hypothesis, not only are all structural forms explained without appeal to any author of Nature or Being apart from Nature, but it also affirms religion, morals, ethical systems, and social organisms to be natural developments; and all progress of a psychical sort to be only a continuous widening of the relations of the mind to the universe.

The two theories can not compromise, as they can not harmonize. It is waste of time to try to compel them to do so. On the contrary, they sharply antagonize. One asserts the universe of matter, involving mind, to have been created from nothing by a pre-existing Deity, and that out of that created something he shaped all appearances,

whether organic or inorganic-at least as far as species. By the other theory a vital and moral force has eternally constituted a substantial universe, uncreatable and indestructible; working continuous progressive change-man being, so far as our vision goes, its final and highest product. The older theory accounts for the universe, for life, for species, for religion, for the Bible, on supernatural grounds; the later theory bluntly affirms that it can account for all things as purely natural processes. The older theory premises a God as originally existing, and nothing else. By his personal will all things have come into existence. By his special providence many things have been adjusted. By his special inspiration man has a theology and religion of salvation. Evolution refuses to accede to this, but assumes that whatever is, always was and always will be; and that, from universe to man, all appearances are but phases of eternal and every way modifiable substance, energy, and sentience. Religion, by the same authority, is a result of mind adjusted and re-adjusted to widening environments of knowledge; beginning, as the outlook of a primitive creature, with meager powers of investigation and generalization, and growing broader, deeper, and more rational as the mind rose to an apprehension of cosmical surroundings, and at last grasped the conception infinite.

This is the antagonism, direct and aggressive, which has grown up between theology and science. It remains now to see whether evolution, beside giving us a more rational explanation of the universe, can, as a philosophy, give us also a richer and more satisfying faith-a faith that is constructive of individual character and social order. In these lectures I shall, while attempting no compromise, keep ever in view the necessity of a philosophy that shall ultimate not only in a logic of things, but in the higher logic of right living.

No minister can honestly ignore the conflict. The time

has come when we must either overcome evolution or submit to it. We must comprehend it and disprove it, or readjust our views to its demands. We may premise, in approaching the study, that it would take at least the seal of absolute inspiration to confirm, without question, a theory of the universe and of man framed by remote antiquity, before even the discovery of the revolution of the earth about the sun. Whatever else we have received from primitive ages falls into the class of puerilities or of myths.

I shall now undertake to state the problem of evolution. clearly and succinctly, and in language free from technicalities. There is nothing more amazing to the adult mind, as there is nothing more puzzling to a child, than the vast number of varieties of plants and animals which we meet in even a casual study of Nature. Not only is the ordinary observer overwhelmed with the constant occurrence of new creatures, but the scientist finds it impossible to reduce to order and classification the amazing fecundity of living forms. Of plants, half a million of species are already enrolled, and the number grows even more rapidly than ever before. Of animals, two millions are classified, and we are evidently nowhere near an end.

But in all this infinitude of forms there is a recognized relationship. A turtle may not look much like his saurian cousins, yet their kinship is unquestioned. So also he has as a vertebrate an honest classification with creatures otherwise much more exalted. The horse and the antelope and the bear, and all the higher carnivora and herbivora and the omnivorous apes of the Tertiary period, are traceable to a common ancestor. So it comes about that every living thing finds its place and rank in a series of orders, species, families, etc.

Another fact we soon fall upon, and that is that no two individuals of any sort are exactly alike, but in their close relationship still vary from each other. This variation involves a tendency that is always operative—a tendency that

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