Part 2 (2/2)

And when we pursue this thought further we see that for such creatures as we are the subjection of a large part of our own nature to fixed laws is as necessary for our dominion over ourselves as the fixity of external nature is necessary for our dominion over the world around us.

The fixity of a large part of our nature--nay, of all but the whole of it--is a moral and spiritual necessity. For it requires but a superficial self-examination to discern the indications of what the profoundest research still leaves a mystery--that we are not perfect creatures of our own kind--that our nature does not spontaneously conform to the Supreme Moral Law--that our highest and best consists not in complete obedience to which we cannot attain, but in a perpetual upward struggle. Now such a struggle demands for its indispensable condition something fixed in our nature by which each step upwards shall be made good as it is taken, and afford a firm footing for the next ascent. If there were nothing in us fixed and firm, if the warfare with evil impulses, wayward affections, overmastering appet.i.tes had to be carried on through life without the possibility of making any victory complete, the formation of a perpetually higher and n.o.bler character would be impossible; our main hope in this life, our best offering to G.o.d would be taken away from us; we could never give our bodies to be a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to G.o.d; we could give our separate acts but not ourselves, for we should be utterly unable to form ourselves into fitness for such a purpose. The task given to the will is not only to govern the actions but to discipline the nature; but discipline is impossible where there is no fixity in the thing to be disciplined.

And this becomes still more important when we search more deeply and perceive that not the nature only but the will itself is in some strange way infected with evil. We can hardly imagine even a perfectly pure will capable of continuing to the end a conflict in which no progress ever was or could be made. The tremendous strain of fighting with an enemy that might be defeated again and again for ever without ever suffering any change or relaxing the violence of any attack or giving the slightest hope of any relief, would seem too much for the most unearthly, the most n.o.ble, the most G.o.dlike of human wills. But wills such as ours, penetrated with weakness, perhaps with treachery to their own best aspirations, how utterly impossible that they could persevere through such a hopeless conflict.

It is the sustaining hope of the Christian that he shall be changed from glory to glory into the image or likeness of His Lord, and that when all is over for this life he shall be indeed like Him and see Him as He is.

But that hope is never presented as one to be realized by some sudden stroke fas.h.i.+oning the soul anew and moulding it at once into heavenly lineaments. It is by steady and sure degrees that the Christian believes that he shall be thus blessed. And this progress rests on the fixed rules by which his nature is governed, and which admit of the character being gradually changed by the life. The Christian knows that G.o.d has so made us that a temptation once overcome is permanently weakened, and often overcome is at last altogether expelled; that appet.i.tes restrained are in the end subdued and cost but little effort to keep down; that bad thoughts perpetually put aside at last return no more; that a clearer perception of duty and a more resolute obedience to its call makes duty itself more attractive, fills us with enthusiasm for its fulfilment, draws us as it were upwards, and enn.o.bles the whole man. The Christian knows that the thought of the Supreme Being, the contemplation of His excellency, the recognition of Him as the source of spiritual life has a strange power to transform, and evermore to transform the whole man. In this knowledge the Christian lives his life and fights his battle. And what is this but a knowledge that he has a nature subject to fixed laws, which he can indeed interfere with, but without which his self-discipline would be of little value, and a.s.suredly could not long continue.

And if the progress of Science and the examination of human nature should eventually restrict more closely than we might have supposed the length to which the interference of the will can go; if it should appear that the changes which we can make at any one moment in ourselves are within a very narrow range, this, too, will be knowledge that can be used in our self-discipline and quite as much perhaps in our mutual moral aid. It is conceivable that the branch of science which treats of human nature may in the end profoundly modify our modes of education, and our hopes of what can be effected by it. But if so the knowledge will only add to the store of means put within our reach for the elevation of our race. And we may be sure that nothing of this sort will really affect the revelation that G.o.d has written in our souls that we are free and responsible beings, and cannot get quit of our responsibility.

LECTURE IV.

APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION.

Foundation of the doctrine of Evolution. Great development in recent times. Objection felt by many religious men. Alleged to destroy argument from design. Paley's argument examined. Doctrine of Evolution adds force to the argument, and removes objections to it. Argument from progress; from beauty; from unity. The conflict not real.

LECTURE IV.

APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION.

'For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and G.o.dhead.' _Romans_ i. 20.

The regularity of nature is the first postulate of Science; but it requires the very slightest observation to show us that, along with this regularity, there exists a vast irregularity which Science can only deal with by exclusion from its province. The world as we see it is full of changes; and these changes when patiently and perseveringly examined are found to be subject to invariable or almost invariable laws. But the things themselves which thus change are as multifarious as the changes which they undergo. They vary infinitely in quant.i.ty, in qualities, in arrangement throughout s.p.a.ce, possibly in arrangement throughout time.

Take a single substance such, say, as gold. How much gold there is in the whole universe, and where it is situated, we not only have no knowledge, but can hardly be said to be on the way to have knowledge.

Why its qualities are what they are, and why it alone possesses all these qualities; how long it has existed, and how long it will continue to exist, these questions we are unable to answer. The existence of the many forms of matter, the properties of each form, the distribution of each: all this Science must in the last resort a.s.sume.

But I say in the last resort. For it is possible, and Science soon makes it evident that it is true, that some forms of matter grow out of other forms. There are endless combinations. And the growth of new out of old forms is of necessity a sequence, and falls under the law of invariability of sequences, and becomes the subject-matter of Science.

As in each separate case Science a.s.serts each event of to-day to have followed by a law of invariable sequence on the events of yesterday; the earth has reached the precise point in its...o...b..t now which was determined by the law of gravitation as applied to its motion at the point which it reached a moment ago; the weather of the present hour has come by meteorological laws out of the weather of the last hour; the crops and the flocks now found on the surface of the habitable earth are the necessary outcome of preceding harvests and preceding flocks and of all that has been done to maintain and increase them; so, too, if we look at the universe as a whole, the present condition of that whole is, if the scientific postulate of invariable sequence be admitted, and in as far as it is admitted, the necessary outcome of its former condition; and all the various forms of matter, whether living or inanimate, must for the same reason and with the same limitation be the necessary outcome of preceding forms of matter. This is the foundation of the doctrine of Evolution.

Now stated in this abstract form this doctrine will be, and indeed if Science be admitted at all must be, accepted by everybody. Even the Roman Church, which holds that G.o.d is perpetually interfering with the course of nature, either in the interests of religious truth or out of loving kindness to His creatures, yet will acknowledge that the number of such interferences almost disappears in comparison of the countless millions of instances in which there is no reason to believe in any interference at all. And if we look at the universe as a whole, the general proposition as stated above is quite unaffected by the infinitesimal exception which is to be made by a believer in frequent miracles. But when this proposition is applied in detail it at once introduces the possibility of an entirely new history of the material universe. For this universe as we see it is almost entirely made up of composite and not of simple substances. We have been able to a.n.a.lyse all the substances that we know into a comparatively small number of simple elements--some usually solid, some liquid, some gaseous. But these simple elements are rarely found uncombined with others; most of those which we meet with in a pure state have been taken out of combination and reduced to simplicity by human agency. The various metals that we ordinarily use are mostly found in a state of ore, and we do not generally obtain them pure except by smelting. The air we breathe, though not a compound, is a mixture. The water which is essential to our life is a compound. And, if we pa.s.s from inorganic to organic substances, all vegetables and animals are compound, sustained by various articles of food which go to make up their frames. Now, how have these compounds been formed? It is quite possible that some of them, or all of them to some extent, may have been formed from the first. If Science could go back to the beginning of all things, which it obviously cannot, it might find the composition already accomplished, and be compelled to start with it as a given fact--a fact as incapable of scientific explanation as the existence of matter at all. But, on the other hand, composition and decomposition is a matter of every-day experience. Our very food could not nourish us except by pa.s.sing through these processes in our bodies; and by the same processes we prepare much of our food before consuming it. May not Science go back to the time when these processes had not yet begun? May not the starting-point of the history of the universe be a condition in which the simple elements were still uncombined? If Science could go back to the beginning of all things, might we not find all the elements of material things ready indeed for the action of the inherent forces which would presently unite them in an infinite variety of combinations, but as yet still separate from each other? Scattered through enormous regions of s.p.a.ce, but drawn together by the force of gravitation; their original heat, whatever it may have been, increased by their mutual collision; made to act chemically on one another by such increase or by subsequent decrease of temperature; perpetually approaching nearer to the forms into which, by the incessant action of the same forces, the present universe has grown; these elements, and the working of the several laws of their own proper nature, may be enough to account scientifically for all the phenomena that we observe. We do not even then get back to regularity. Why these elements, and no others; why in these precise quant.i.ties; why so distributed in s.p.a.ce; why endowed with these properties: still are questions which Science cannot answer, and there seems no reason to expect that any scientific answer will ever be possible. Nay, I know not whether it may not be a.s.serted that the impossibility of answering one at least among these questions is capable of demonstration. For the whole system of things, as far as we know it, depends on the perpetual rotation of the heavenly bodies; and without original irregularity in the distribution of matter no motion of rotation could ever have spontaneously arisen. And if this irregularity be thus original, Science can give no account of it. Science, therefore, will have to begin with a.s.suming certain facts for which it can never hope to account. But it _may_ begin by a.s.suming that, speaking roughly, the universe was always very much what we see it now, and that composition and decomposition have always nearly balanced each other, and that there have been from the beginning the same sun and moon and planets and stars in the sky, the same animals on the earth and in the seas, the same vegetation, the same minerals; and that though there have been incessant changes, and possibly all these changes in one general direction, yet these changes have never amounted to what would furnish a scientific explanation of the forms which matter has a.s.sumed. Or, on the other hand, Science _may_ a.s.sert the possibility of going back to a far earlier condition of our material system; may a.s.sert that all the forms of matter have grown up under the action of laws and forces still at work; may take as the initial state of our universe one or many enormous clouds of gaseous matter, and endeavour to trace with more or less exactness how these gradually formed themselves into what we see. Science has lately leaned to the latter alternative. To a believer the alternative may be stated thus: We all distinguish between the original creation of the material world and the history of it ever since. And we have, nay all men have, been accustomed to a.s.sign to the original creation a great deal that Science is now disposed to a.s.sign to the history. But the distinction between the original creation and the subsequent history would still remain, and for ever remain, although the portion a.s.signed to the one may be less, and that a.s.signed to the other larger, than was formerly supposed. However far back Science may be able to push its beginning, there still must lie behind that beginning the original act of creation--creation not of matter only, but of the various kinds of matter, and of the laws governing all and each of those kinds, and of the distribution of this matter in s.p.a.ce.

This application of the abstract doctrine of Evolution gives it an enormous and startling expansion: so enormous and so startling that the doctrine itself seems absolutely new. To say that the present grows by regular law out of the past is one thing; to say that it has grown out of a distant past in which as yet the present forms of life upon the earth, the present vegetation, the seas and islands and continents, the very planet itself, the sun and moon, were not yet made--and all this also by regular law--that is quite another thing. And the bearings of this new application of Science deserve study.

Now it seems quite plain that this doctrine of Evolution is in no sense whatever antagonistic to the teachings of Religion, though it may be, and that we shall have to consider afterwards, to the teachings of revelation. Why then should religious men independently of its relation to revelation shrink from it, as very many unquestionably do? The reason is that, whilst this doctrine leaves the truth of the existence and supremacy of G.o.d exactly where it was, it cuts away, or appears to cut away, some of the main arguments for that truth.

Now, in regard to the arguments whereby we have been accustomed to prove or to corroborate the existence of a Supreme Being, it is plain that, to take these arguments away or to make it impossible to use them, is not to disprove or take away the truth itself. We find every day instances of men resting their faith in a truth on some grounds which we know to be untenable, and we see what a terrible trial it sometimes is when they find out that this is so, and know not as yet on what other ground they are to take their stand. And some men succ.u.mb in the trial and lose their faith together with the argument which has. .h.i.therto supported it.

But the truth still stands in spite of the failure of some to keep their belief in it, and in spite of the impossibility of supporting it by the old arguments.

And when men have become accustomed to rest their belief on new grounds the loss of the old arguments is never found to be a very serious matter. Belief in revelation has been shaken again and again by this very increase of knowledge. It was unquestionably a dreadful blow to many in the days of Galileo to find that the language of the Bible in regard to the movement of the earth and sun was not scientifically correct. It was a dreadful blow to many in the days of the Reformation to find that they had been misled by what they believed to be an infallible Church.

Such shocks to faith try the mettle of men's moral and spiritual conviction, and they often refuse altogether to hold what they can no longer establish by the arguments which have hitherto been to them the decisive, perhaps the sole decisive, proofs.

And yet in spite of these shocks belief in revelation is strong still in men's souls, and is clearly not yet going to quit the world.

But let us go on to consider how far it is true that the arguments which have hitherto been regarded as proving the existence of a Supreme Creator are really affected very gravely by this doctrine of Evolution.

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