"If this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God."

To the man who, like the founder of these lectures, finds in an ordered universe an evidence of a wise creator and a revelation of God's methods, the Darwinian theory comes as a welcome contribution of science to theistic philosophy. It was unfortunately not received in that spirit by the world as a whole. Men who had been brought up to think that God created the world in one way, however irrational and disorderly, believed that his worship was threatened by any evidence that went to show that it had been created in some other way, however rational and orderly. In this respect, the Darwinian theory has simply suffered the fate which has at first befallen every scientific discovery which was stated in terms that the public could

understand. When Copernicus and Galileo developed the theory that the earth and all the other planets moved round the sun, they gave us an orderly and simple astronomical system instead of a disorderly and complicated one; yet the Copernican system was condemned by conservative men as impious, because they had been brought up to believe that God had made the world in a different way and they could find scripture texts which seemed to support their position. We have learned better. We have found out that God's rulership of the universe is not dependent upon the relative positions of the earth and the sun in our planetary system; and we leave it to men like John Jasper to make it a fundamental doctrine of the church that "the sun do move." But not all churches have yet learned to treat the principle of natural selection in the same large-minded spirit. Men of standing and

influence in the community condemned the theory that species, had been created under the operation of general laws, in the same way and for nearly the same reason that their ancestors two centuries earlier had condemned the doctrine that the earth and the other planets moved around the sun under the operation of general laws.

Nor was this kind of misunderstanding confined to the opponents of the Darwinian theory. Many of those who supposed that they were advocating it enthusiastically preached it in forms which its founder would hardly have recognized and based its advocacy on reasons which he would have repudiated. "There is a picture of Charles Darwin in thousands of homes," said a careful student of social problems, "whose occupants care nothing for science and know nothing of what Darwin really said, but who revere him because he is an intellectual force on which their priests

have declared war. They love him, not for the order that he has introduced into our thinking, but for the disorder which he has been falsely charged with introducing." For one man who knows Darwin at first hand-careful, peaceful, and slow to generalize—there are twenty who identify him with the diatribes of Haeckel or the metaphysical theories of Herbert Spencer.

We shall best understand the true significance of Darwinism if we dissociate it from the polemics which have been waged about it and the philosophies which have connected themselves with it, and treat it for what it was an orderly explanation of facts which previously had not been explained; the last, and in many respects the most novel, of the three great theoretical discoveries which the nineteenth century has contributed to the development of modern science.

III

NEW VIEWS OF POLITICS AND OF

T

ETHICS

HE political thought of Europe since 1789 has passed through three phases or stages: the revolutionary stage from 1789 to 1815, the individualistic stage from 1815 to 1848, and the nationalistic stage from 1848 onward.

The ideals of the revolutionary thinkers were summed up in the three watchwords, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. These were not mere phrases, as some people are inclined to assume. They represented important political ideals and aspirations. But none of these watchwords meant quite what we are apt to think it did. The Frenchmen of 1789 did not understand the term liberty as an American or Englishman understands it. They did not mean