The meaning of evolution, in the most general terms, is that the
differentiation of forms is not essentially separate from their
behaviour and use; that if these are within the scope of study, that is
also; that the world has taken the form we see by movements not unlike
those we now see in progress; that what may be called proximate origins
are continuous in the way of force and matter, continuous in the way of
life, with actual occurrences and actual characteristics. All this has
no revolutionary bearing upon the question of ultimate origins. The
whole is a statement about process. It says nothing to metaphysicians
about cause. It simply brings within the scope of observation or
conjecture that series of changes which has given their special
characters to the different parts of the world we see. In particular,
evolutionary science aspires to the discovery of the process or order
of the appearance of life itself: if it were to achieve its aim it
could say nothing of the cause of this or indeed of the most familiar
occurrences. We should have become spectators or convinced historians of
an event which, in respect of its cause and ultimate meaning, would be
still impenetrable.
With regard to the origin of species, supposing life already
established, biological science has the well founded hopes and the
measure of success with which we are all familiar. All this has, it
would seem, little chance of collision with a consistent theism, a
doctrine which has its own difficulties unconnected with any particular
view of order or process. But when it was stated that species had
arisen by processes through which new species were still being made,
evolutionism came into collision with a statement, traditionally
religious, that species were formed and fixed once for all and long ago.
What is the theological import of such a statement when it is regarded
as essential to belief in God? Simply that God's activity, with respect
to the formation of living creatures, ceased at some point in past time.
"God rested" is made the touchstone of orthodoxy. And when, under the
pressure of the evidences, we found ourselves obliged to acknowledge and
assert the present and persistent power of God, in the maintenance and
in the continued formation of "types," what happened was the abolition
of a time-limit. We were forced only to a bolder claim, to a theistic
language less halting, more consistent, more thorough in its own line,
as well as better qualified to assimilate and modify such schemes as
Von Hartmann's philosophy of the unconscious--a philosophy, by the way,
quite intolerant of a merely mechanical evolution. (See Von Hartmann's
"Wahrheit und Irrthum in Darwinismus". Berlin, 1875.)
Here was not the retrenchment of an extravagant assertion, but the
expansion of one which was faltering and inadequate. The traditional
statement did not need paring down so as to pass the meshes of a new and
exacting criticism. It was itself a net meant to surround and enclose
experience; and we must increase its size and close its mesh to hold
newly disclosed facts of life. The world, which had seemed a fixed
picture or model, gained first perspective and then solidity and
movement. We had a glimpse of organic HISTORY; and Christian thought
became more living and more assured as it met the larger view of life.
However unsatisfactory the new attitude might be to our critics, to
Christians the reform was positive. What was discarded was a limitation,
a negation. The movement was essentially conservative, even actually
reconstructive. For the language disused was a language inconsistent
with the definitions of orthodoxy; it set bounds to the infinite, and by
implication withdrew from the creative rule all such processes as could
be brought within the descriptions of research. It ascribed fixity and
finality to that "creature" in which an apostle taught us to recognise
the birth-struggles of an unexhausted progress. It tended to banish
mystery from the world we see, and to confine it to a remote first age.
In the reformed, the restored, language of religion, Creation became
again not a link in a rational series to complete a circle of the
sciences, but the mysterious and permanent relation between the infinite
and the finite, between the moving changes we know in part, and the
Power, after the fashion of that observation, unknown, which is itself
"unmoved all motion's source." (Hymn of the Church-- Rerum Deus tenax
vigor, Immotus in te permanens.)
With regard to man it is hardly necessary, even were it possible, to
illustrate the application of this bolder faith. When the record of his
high extraction fell under dispute, we were driven to a contemplation of
the whole of his life, rather than of a part and that part out of sight.
We remembered again, out of Aristotle, that the result of a process
interprets its beginnings. We were obliged to read the title of such
dignity as we may claim, in results and still more in aspirations.
Some men still measure the value of great present facts in life--reason
and virtue and sacrifice--by what a self-disparaged reason can collect
of the meaner rudiments of these noble gifts. Mr Balfour has admirably
displayed the discrepancy, in this view, between the alleged origin and
the alleged authority of reason. Such an argument ought to be used not
to discredit the confident reason, but to illuminate and dignify its
dark beginnings, and to show that at every step in the long course of
growth a Power was at work which is not included in any term or in all
the terms of the series.
I submit that the more men know of actual Christian teaching, its
fidelity to the past, and its sincerity in face of discovery, the more
certainly they will judge that the stimulus of the doctrine of evolution
has produced in the long run vigour as well as flexibility in the
doctrine of Creation and of man.