He was also, as we now see, a first-rate biologist. It took a century
and a half of evolutionary preachers, from Buffon and Goethe to Butler
and Bergson, to convince us that we and our father are one; that as the
kingdom of heaven is within us we need not go about looking for it and
crying Lo here! and Lo there!; that God is not a picture of a pompous
person in white robes in the family Bible, but a spirit; that it is
through this spirit that we evolve towards greater abundance of life;
that we are the lamps in which the light of the world burns: that, in
cohort, we are gods though we die like men. All that is today sound
biology and psychology; and the efforts of Natural Selectionists like
Weismann to reduce evolution to mere automatism have not touched the
doctrine of Jesus, though they have made short work of the theologians
who conceived God as a magnate keeping men and angels as Lord Rothschild
keeps buffaloes and emus at Tring.