From the influence in religion of scientific modes of thought we pass
to the influence of particular biological conceptions. The former effect
comes by way of analogy, example, encouragement and challenge; inspiring
or provoking kindred or similar modes of thought in the field of
theology; the latter by a collision of opinions upon matters of fact or
conjecture which seem to concern both science and religion.
In the case of Darwinism the story of this collision is familiar, and
falls under the heads of evolution and natural selection, the doctrine
of descent with modification, and the doctrine of its guidance or
determination by the struggle for existence between related varieties.
These doctrines, though associated and interdependent, and in popular
thought not only combined but confused, must be considered separately.
It is true that the ancient doctrine of Evolution, in spite of the
ingenuity and ardour of Lamarck, remained a dream tantalising the
intellectual ambition of naturalists, until the day when Darwin made it
conceivable by suggesting the machinery of its guidance. And, further,
the idea of natural selection has so effectively opened the door of
research and stimulated observation in a score of principal directions
that, even if the Darwinian explanation became one day much less
convincing than, in spite of recent criticism, it now is, yet its
passing, supposing it to pass, would leave the doctrine of Evolution
immeasurably and permanently strengthened. For in the interests of the
theory of selection, "Fur Darwin," as Muller wrote, facts have been
collected which remain in any case evidence of the reality of descent
with modification.
But still, though thus united in the modern history of convictions,
though united and confused in the collision of biological and
traditional opinion, yet evolution and natural selection must be
separated in theological no less than in biological estimation.
Evolution seemed inconsistent with Creation; natural selection with
Providence and Divine design.
Discussion was maintained about these points for many years and with
much dark heat. It ranged over many particular topics and engaged minds
different in tone, in quality, and in accomplishment. There was at
most times a degree of misconception. Some naturalists attributed to
theologians in general a poverty of thought which belonged really to
men of a particular temper or training. The "timid theism" discerned in
Darwin by so cautious a theologian as Liddon (H.P. Liddon, "The Recovery
of S. Thomas"; a sermon preached in St Paul's, London, on April 23rd,
1882 (the Sunday after Darwin's death).) was supposed by many biologists
to be the necessary foundation of an honest Christianity. It was really
more characteristic of devout NATURALISTS like Philip Henry Gosse,
than of religious believers as such. (Dr Pusey ("Unscience not Science
adverse to Faith" 1878) writes: "The questions as to 'species,' of what
variations the animal world is capable, whether the species be more or
fewer, whether accidental variations may become hereditary... and
the like, naturally fall under the province of science. In all these
questions Mr Darwin's careful observations gained for him a deserved
approbation and confidence.") The study of theologians more considerable
and even more typically conservative than Liddon does not confirm the
description of religious intolerance given in good faith, but in serious
ignorance, by a disputant so acute, so observant and so candid as
Huxley. Something hid from each other's knowledge the devoted pilgrims
in two great ways of thought. The truth may be, that naturalists took
their view of what creation was from Christian men of science who
naturally looked in their own special studies for the supports and
illustrations of their religious belief. Of almost every laborious
student it may be said "Hic ab arte sua non recessit." And both the
believing and the denying naturalists, confining habitual attention to a
part of experience, are apt to affirm and deny with trenchant vigour
and something of a narrow clearness "Qui respiciunt ad pauca, de facili
pronunciant." (Aristotle, in Bacon, quoted by Newman in his "Idea of a
University", page 78. London, 1873.)
Newman says of some secular teachers that "they persuade the world of
what is false by urging upon it what is true." Of some early opponents
of Darwin it might be said by a candid friend that, in all sincerity of
devotion to truth, they tried to persuade the world of what is true
by urging upon it what is false. If naturalists took their version
of orthodoxy from amateurs in theology, some conservative Christians,
instead of learning what evolution meant to its regular exponents,
took their view of it from celebrated persons, not of the front rank in
theology or in thought, but eager to take account of public movements
and able to arrest public attention.
Cleverness and eloquence on both sides certainly had their share in
producing the very great and general disturbance of men's minds in the
early days of Darwinian teaching. But by far the greater part of that
disturbance was due to the practical novelty and the profound importance
of the teaching itself, and to the fact that the controversy about
evolution quickly became much more public than any controversy of equal
seriousness had been for many generations.
We must not think lightly of that great disturbance because it has, in
some real sense, done its work, and because it is impossible in days
of more coolness and light, to recover a full sense of its very real
difficulties.
Those who would know them better should add to the calm records of
Darwin ("Life and Letters" and "More Letters of Charles Darwin".) and to
the story of Huxley's impassioned championship, all that they can learn
of George Romanes. ("Life and Letters", London, 1896. "Thoughts on
Religion", London, 1895. "Candid Examination of Theism", London, 1878.)
For his life was absorbed in this very struggle and reproduced
its stages. It began in a certain assured simplicity of biblical
interpretation; it went on, through the glories and adventures of a
paladin in Darwin's train, to the darkness and dismay of a man who saw
all his most cherished beliefs rendered, as he thought, incredible.
("Never in the history of man has so terrific a calamity befallen the
race as that which all who look may now (viz. in consequence of the
scientific victory of Darwin) behold advancing as a deluge, black with
destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes,
engulphing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in
mindless destruction."--"A Candid Examination of Theism", page 51.)
He lived to find the freer faith for which process and purpose are
not irreconcilable, but necessary to one another. His development,
scientific, intellectual and moral, was itself of high significance; and
its record is of unique value to our own generation, so near the age of
that doubt and yet so far from it; certainly still much in need of
the caution and courage by which past endurance prepares men for
new emergencies. We have little enough reason to be sure that in the
discussions awaiting us we shall do as well as our predecessors in
theirs. Remembering their endurance of mental pain, their ardour
in mental labour, the heroic temper and the high sincerity of
controversialists on either side, we may well speak of our fathers in
such words of modesty and self-judgment as Drayton used when he sang the
victors of Agincourt. The progress of biblical study, in the departments
of Introduction and Exegesis, resulting in the recovery of a point
of view anciently tolerated if not prevalent, has altered some of the
conditions of that discussion. In the years near 1858, the witness of
Scripture was adduced both by Christian advocates and their critics as
if unmistakeably irreconcilable with Evolution.
Huxley ("Science and Christian Tradition". London, 1904.) found the path
of the blameless naturalist everywhere blocked by "Moses": the believer
in revelation was generally held to be forced to a choice between
revealed cosmogony and the scientific account of origins. It is not
clear how far the change in Biblical interpretation is due to natural
science, and how far to the vital movements of theological study which
have been quite independent of the controversy about species. It belongs
to a general renewal of Christian movement, the recovery of a heritage.
"Special Creation"--really a biological rather than a theological
conception,--seems in its rigid form to have been a recent element even
in English biblical orthodoxy.
The Middle Ages had no suspicion that religious faith forbad
inquiry into the natural origination of the different forms of life.
Bartholomaeus Anglicus, an English Franciscan of the thirteenth century,
was a mutationist in his way, as Aristotle, "the Philosopher" of
the Christian Schoolmen, had been in his. So late as the seventeenth
century, as we learn not only from early proceedings of the Royal
Society, but from a writer so homely and so regularly pious as
Walton, the variation of species and "spontaneous" generations had no
theological bearing, except as instances of that various wonder of the
world which in devout minds is food for devotion.
It was in the eighteenth century that the harder statement took shape.
Something in the preciseness of that age, its exaltation of law, its
cold passion for a stable and measured universe, its cold denial, its
cold affirmation of the power of God, a God of ice, is the occasion of
that rigidity of religious thought about the living world which Darwin
by accident challenged, or rather by one of those movements of genius
which, Goethe ("No productiveness of the highest kind... is in the power
of anyone."--"Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret". London,
1850.) declares, are "elevated above all earthly control."
If religious thought in the eighteenth century was aimed at a fixed and
nearly finite world of spirit, it followed in all these respects the
secular and critical lead. ("La philosophie reformatrice du XVIIIe
siecle" (Berthelot, "Evolutionisme et Platonisme", Paris, 1908, page
45.) ramenait la nature et la societe a des mecanismes que la pensee
reflechie peut concevoir et recomposer." In fact, religion in a
mechanical age is condemned if it takes any but a mechanical tone.
Butler's thought was too moving, too vital, too evolutionary, for the
sceptics of his time. In a rationalist, encyclopaedic period, religion
also must give hard outline to its facts, it must be able to display
its secret to any sensible man in the language used by all sensible men.
Milton's prophetic genius furnished the eighteenth century, out of the
depth of the passionate age before it, with the theological tone it was
to need. In spite of the austere magnificence of his devotion, he gives
to smaller souls a dangerous lead. The rigidity of Scripture exegesis
belonged to this stately but imperfectly sensitive mode of thought. It
passed away with the influence of the older rationalists whose precise
denials matched the precise and limited affirmations of the static
orthodoxy.
I shall, then, leave the specially biblical aspect of the
debate--interesting as it is and even useful, as in Huxley's
correspondence with the Duke of Argyll and others in 1892 ("Times",
1892, passim.)--in order to consider without complication the permanent
elements of Christian thought brought into question by the teaching of
evolution.
Such permanent elements are the doctrine of God as Creator of the
universe, and the doctrine of man as spiritual and unique. Upon both the
doctrine of evolution seemed to fall with crushing force.
With regard to Man I leave out, acknowledging a grave omission, the
doctrine of the Fall and of Sin. And I do so because these have not yet,
as I believe, been adequately treated: here the fruitful reaction to the
stimulus of evolution is yet to come. The doctrine of sin, indeed, falls
principally within the scope of that discussion which has followed or
displaced the Darwinian; and without it the Fall cannot be usefully
considered. For the question about the Fall is a question not merely of
origins, but of the interpretation of moral facts whose moral reality
must first be established.