I TAKE two texts, one of them from the New Testament. It may be found
in the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew, the
seventeenth verse, "Think not that I came to destroy the law or the
prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil." The other text is from
Emerson: "One accent of the Holy Ghost The heedless world hath never
lost."
The theory of evolution to-day, in the minds of all competent students,
is quite as firmly established as is the law of gravity or the
Copernican theory in astronomy. But, when it was first propounded in
its modern form by Herbert Spencer, when he issued his first book, and
when Darwin's "Origin of Species" was published, there was an outcry,
especially throughout the religious world. There was a great fear
shuddered through the hearts of men. They felt as though the dearest
things on earth were threatened and were likely to be destroyed.
Essayists declared that this theory undermined the foundations of
morals. They said that it took away, not only the Bible, but God and
all rational religion. They told us that, in tracing the ancestry of
man back and down to the animals, humanity was being desecrated, and
that the essential feature of man as a child of God was being taken
away.
If I believed that any of these things were true, I might not be an
enemy of evolution, if indeed it be established; for there is very
little reason in a man's setting himself against an established truth.
But I should certainly be very sad, and should wish that we might hold
some other theory of things. But I believe that it will appear, as we
study the matter a little while carefully, that not only are these
charges that have been brought against the theory baseless, but that
right here is to be found not only the real progress of the world, but
the true conservatism. Evolution is the most conservative theory that
has ever been held. It keeps everything that has been found serviceable
to man. It may transform it. It may lift it to some higher level, on to
some loftier range of life; but it keeps and carries forward everything
that helps. This inevitably and in the nature of things.
There are two great tendencies which are characteristic of that method
of progress or growth which we call by the name of evolution. One is
the hereditary tendency, and the other is the tendency to variation.
One, if it were in full force, would merely, forever and forever,
repeat the past: the other, if it were in full force, would blot out
all the past, and forever be creating something new. It is in the
balance of these two tendencies that we discover the orderly growth of
the world; and this orderly growth it is which constitutes evolution.
Let me illustrate: Here is a tree, for example. The tendency that we
call heredity would simply constantly repeat the past: the tendency to
vary would vary the tree out of existence. The ideal is that it shall
keep its form, for example, as an oak, but that, in the process of
growth, the bark shall expand freely and sufficiently to make room for
the manifestation of the new life. Now, if the bark had power to refuse
expansion, of course, you know, the tree would die. If there were not
power enough to maintain the form, then, again, the tree would cease to
exist. This you may take as a type and illustration of the method of
all life and all progress everywhere.
Those people who naturally represent the heredity tendency what we
call the conservative people of the world are the ones who are always
afraid of any change. They deprecate the utterance of new ideas. They
hesitate to accept any new-fangled notions, as perhaps they call them.
They are afraid that something precious, something sweet, something
dear, that belonged to the past, may be lost.
This manifests itself in all departments of life. I suppose that there
never was an improvement proposed in the world that somebody did not
object to it in the interests of the established order. And yet, if
these people that do not want any changes made had had control of the
world ten thousand years ago, where should we be to-day? We should
still be barbarians in the jungles. For it is because these people have
not been able to keep the world still that we have advanced here and
there in the direction of what we are pleased to call civilization. You
remember, for example, as illustrating this opposition, how the
workingmen, the laborers of the time, a few years ago, in England,
fought against the introduction of machinery. They said machinery was
going to take their work away, it was going to break down the old
industrial order of the world, it was going to make it impossible for
the laborer to get his living. A few machines were to do the world's
work; and the great multitude were to be idle, and, not having anything
to do, were to receive no pay for labor, and consequently were to
starve. This was the cry. The outcome has been that there has been
infinitely more done, a much larger number of laborers employed,
employed less hours in the day, paid higher wages; and in every
direction the condition of the industrial world has been improved. I
speak of this simply as an illustration of this tendency.
When we come to religion, it is perfectly natural that the opposition
here should be bitterer than anywhere else in the world; and it always
has been. If you think of it just a little, if you read the history of
the world a little, you will find that the last thing on earth that
people have been willing to improve has been their religion. And this,
I say, is perfectly natural. Why? Because men have instinctively felt
and rightly felt, as I believe that religion was the most important
thing in human life. They felt that it was the most sacred thing, that
on it depended higher and more permanent interests than on anything
else; and they have naturally been timid, naturally shrunk from change,
with the fear that changing the theories and the practices and the
thoughts was going to endanger the thing itself. They have said, We
will hold on, at any rate, to these reverences, these worships, these
precious trusts, these hopes; and we will hold on to the vessels in
which we have carried them, because how do we know, if the vessels are
changed or taken away, that we may not lose the precious contents
themselves? This, I say, has been the feeling; and it has been a
perfectly natural feeling.
I wish then, this morning, for a little while to review with you some
of the steps in evolution that the world has taken, and let you see how
it has worked in different departments of human thought and human life,
so that you may become convinced if possible, as I am that evolution
has never thrown away, has never lost, anything precious in any
department of the world since human life began. If I believed it did, I
would fight against it. For instance, here is a devout Catholic
servant-girl. She believes in her saints. She counts her beads and
recites her Ave Marias. She goes to the cathedral on Sunday morning.
And this is her world of poetry and romance. Here is a source of
comfort. This throws a halo around the drudgery of the kitchen, the
service of the house in which she is an employee. Would I take away
this trust, this poetry, this romance, untrue as I believe it to be in
form, inadequate as I believe it to be? Would I take it away, and leave
her mind bare, her heart empty, leave her without the comfort, without
the inspiration? Not for one moment. I would take it away only if, in
the process, I could supply her with something just a little better, a
little more nearly true, something that would give her comfort,
something that would be an inspiration to her, something that would
buoy her up as a hope, something that would help her to be faithful and
true in the work of her daily life. This is what evolution means. It
means taking away the old, and, in the process, substituting therefore
something a little bit better. I would not take away the idol of the
lowest barbarian unless I could help him to take a step a little
higher, so that he should see the intellectual and spiritual thing that
the idol stood for, and so enable him to walk his pathway of life as
firmly, as faithfully, as hopefully, as he did before.
I have been watching the work that has been going on in our streets
during the last months. You, too, have seen how they will replace the
track on an entire line of railway without stopping the running of the
cars. They take away the old and worn and poorer, but constantly
substitute something better for it; and human life moves right on.
Everything is better; the change has come; but that change is; an
improvement. This is what evolution does; for evolution is nothing new
in the world. It is only the name for the method of God, which is as
old as the universe itself, new to us because we have just discovered
it; but as old as the light of a star that has been travelling for
twenty-five thousand years, and has just come into the field of the
astronomer's telescope, so that he announces it as a new discovery..
This is what it means.
Now let me call your attention to the fact that in the world below us
the world of the trees and the shrubs and the flowers and the plants
this evolutionary force is working after precisely the same method that
I have just been indicating. All the fair, the beautiful things have
been developed under this process, in accordance with this method, out
of the first bare and rough and crude manifestations of vegetable life.
Nothing has been thrown away that was of any value. Take it, for
example, in regard to the wild weeds which have become the oats and the
wheat and the barley and the rye of the world. All the old that was of
value has been kept and has been developed into something higher and
finer and sweeter. The aboriginal crab-apple has become a thousand
luscious kinds of fruits; and the flowers all their beauty, all their
fragrance, all their color and form? are the result of the working of
this method of God's power that we have called evolution. Nothing of
any value is left behind in the uncounted ages of the past. All that is
of worth to-day has been transformed and lifted to some higher level
and made a part of the wondrous life that is all around us.
So, when you come to the animal life, you find the same thing. The
swift foot, the flashing wing, the beauty of color, all the wonders of
animal life have simply been developed in accordance with this method
and under this impelling force which we call evolution, which is only a
name for the working of God.
When we come up to the level of man, what do we find? Man as an animal
is not the equal of a good many of the other animals in the world. He
is not as swift as the deer, he is not as strong as the lion, he cannot
fly in the air like a bird, he cannot live in the sea like the fishes.
He is restricted to the comparatively contracted area of the surface of
the land. He is not as perfect as an animal; but what has evolution
done? It has given him power of conquest over all these, because the
evolutionary force has left the bodily structure, we need expect no
more marked changes there, and has gone to brain. So this feeblest of
all the animals physically speaking he would be no match for a hundred
different kinds of animals that are about us is able to outwit them
all, that is, to outknow, he has become the ruler of the earth. And not
only has this evolutionary force gone to brain, it has gone to heart;
and man has become a being whose primest characteristic is love. The
one thing that we think of as most perfect, that we dream of as
characterizing his future development, is summed up in his affectional
nature. Then, too, he has become a moral being.
There are times, like the present, when it seems as though the animal
were at the top, and the affectional nature suppressed, and the
conscience were ruled out of court; and yet you study the methods of
modern warfare as compared with those of the past, you see how pity and
tenderness and care walk by the side of every gun, hide in the rear of
every battlefield to attend to the wounded and suffering. And you know
what talk there has been of pity for the hungry, the desire of the
world to feed those that need; and the one dominant note in the
discussion of the war all over the world has been the question as to
its being right. No matter how we may have decided, whether the
decision be correct or not, the civilized world bows itself in the
presence of its ideal of right, and demands that no war shall be fought
the issue of which is not to be a better condition of mankind.
Evolution, then, tends to the development of brain, heart, conscience,
and the spiritual nature of man. It has left nothing behind that is of
any value to us. It has transformed or sublimed or lifted all up into
the higher range of the life that we are living to-day, and contains
within itself a promise of the higher and the grander life that we
reach forward to to-morrow.
I wish now, for a moment, to illustrate the working of this in regard
to some of the institutions of the world. If I had time, I could show
you that the same law is apparent in the development of the arts,
sculpture, painting, poetry. I must pass them by, however. As
illustrating what I mean, let me take the one art of music. From the
very beginning man has been interested in making some sort of sounds
which, I suppose, have been regarded as music by him. Most of those
that are associated with the barbaric man would be anything but music
to us. The music, for example, that they give in connection with a play
in a Chinese theatre would not be acceptable to the cultivated ear of
Americans. We have left behind much that the world called music. We
have left behind any number of musical instruments. We do not now have
those that the Psalmist makes so much of, the old-time harp, the
sackbut, the psaltery. I do not know, though you may, what kind of
instruments they were. The world has completely forgotten them, and
left them out of sight. And yet no musical note, no musical chord, no
musical thought, no musical feeling, has been forgotten or dropped
along the advancing pathway of the world's progress; and in our organs
all the attempts at instruments of that kind from the beginning of the
world are preserved, transformed and glorified. In our magnificent
orchestras all the first feeble beginnings are developed until we have
a conception of music to-day such as would have been utterly
incomprehensible to the primeval man. What I wish you to note is and
this is the use of my illustration that the advancing growth of the
music of the world has forgotten nothing that it was worth while to
keep.
Let me give you one more illustration. Take it in the line of
government. The first tribes were governed by two forces, brute force
and superstitious fear. These were the two things that kept the primal
tribes of the world in order, such order as was maintained in those
far-off times. The world has gone on developing different types of
government, different types of social order. I need not stop to outline
them for you this morning: you know what they are; and I only wish you
to catch the thought I have in mind. I suppose that every time one of
the old types was about to pass away the adherents of that type have
been in a panic lest anarchy was threatening the world. Believers in
these types have said that it was absolutely necessary to keep them, in
order to preserve social order. Take the attitude of the monarchy
to-day, for example, as towards the republic. When we attempted to
establish our republic here in this western world, it was freely said
by the adherents of the old political idea in Europe that it would of
necessity be a failure, that there was no possibility of a stable human
order without a hierarchy of nobles with a king at the top; and I
suppose they believed it. But we have proved beyond question that we
can have a strong government, an orderly government, without either
nobility or king. There is less government in the United States here
to-day than in almost any other country of the world, a nearer approach
to what the philosopher would call anarchy. Anarchy does not mean
disorder, when a philosopher is talking: it means merely the absence of
external government. And that is the ideal that we are approaching.
Paul says, you know, that the law was made for wicked people, for the
disobedient and the disorderly, not for good people. How many people
are there in New York to-day, for example, who are honest, who pay
their debts, who did not commit a burglary last night, who do not
propose to be false to wife and home, on account of the law, the
existence of courts and police? The great majority of the citizens of
America to-day would go right on being honest and kind and loving and
helpful, whether there were any laws or not. They are not kept to these
courses of conduct by the law. They have learned that these are the
fitting ways of life that these are the things for a man to do; and
they despise themselves if they are less than man. In other words, this
governmental order, which exists as an outside force, at last gets
written in the heart and becomes a law of life.
Now precisely the same process is going on in other departments of the
world: it is going on in religion. And now let me come to religion, and
illustrate the working of the law here. The old types of religious
thought and life and practice, the first ones that the world knew, are
long since outgrown. We regard them as barbaric, as cruel.
We have learned that there are not a million gods of whom we need stand
in awe. We have learned that God is no partial God. We have learned
that God does not want us, as universal man once believed, to sacrifice
the dearest object of our love. We have learned that he does not want
us to sacrifice our first-born child, as the old Hebrews used to, and
the remains of which custom are plainly visible throughout the Old
Testament everywhere. We have left behind these old types of religious
thought and life; but the world has lost nothing in the process. The
world has not left religion behind. The whole process of growth and
development in the sphere of the religious life and the development of
man has been one of outgrowing crude and partial and inadequate
thoughts and feelings about the universe and God and man and duty and
destiny.
We do not care so much about ceremony as the world did once. The most
civilized people in the world are not so given to these things in their
religious development. We do not care so much about creed as they did a
thousand or five hundred years ago. We do not believe that God is going
to judge us by our intellectual conceptions of him and of our fellow-
men. And I suppose it is true, always has been true as it is to-day,
that the adherent of any particular form or theory of the religious
life has the feeling that, when that is threatened, religion is
threatened; and he defends it passionately, fights for it, perhaps
bitterly, feels justified in opposing, perhaps hating, those he regards
as the enemies of God and his great and sacred and religious hopes. And
yet we know, as we study the past, whether we can quite appreciate it
as true in regard to the theories which I am voicing to-day, that the
truth has never been in any danger, and the highest and finest and
sweetest things in the religious life have never been in any danger,
are not in any danger to-day.
Let me indicate in two or three directions. There has been a class of
thinkers, which has done a good deal of talking and writing in this
direction, who are telling us that the poetry, the romance, the wonder,
the mystery, of the world those things that tend to bring a man to his
knees and to lift his eyes in awe and reverence are passing away; that
science is going to explore everything; that there is going to be no
more unknown; and that, when we have completed this process, one of the
great essentials of religious thought and feeling and life will have
perished from among men. I venture to say to you that there has never
been a time in the history of the world when there was so much of
mystery, so much of wonder, so much of reverence, so much of awe, as
there is to-day. We are apt to fool ourselves in our thinking, and,
when we have observed a fact, and labelled it, to think we know it.
For example, here is this mysterious force that we call electricity,
which is flashing such light in our homes and through our streets as
the world has never known before. The cars, loaded, are speeding along
our highways with no visible means of propulsion. We step up to a
little box, and put a shell to our ear, and speak and listen, and
converse with a friend in Boston or Chicago, recognizing the voice
perfectly, as though this friend were by our side. We send a message
over a wire, under the deep, and talk to London and all round the
globe; and we have labelled this force electricity. And, instead of
getting down on our knees in reverence, we get impatient if our
communication is delayed two minutes or three. We fool ourselves with
the thought that, because we have called it electricity, we know it, we
have taken the mystery out of the fact. Why, friends, do you know
anything about electricity? Do you know what it is? Do you know why it
works as it does? I do not; and I do not know of anybody on the face of
the earth who does. The wonder of the "Arabian Nights" is cheap and
tame and theatrical compared to the wonder of this everyday workaday
world of ours, in the midst of which and by means of which we are
carrying on our business and our daily avocations. The wonder of the
carpet that would carry the person through the air who sat upon it and
wished is nothing compared with the power of electricity, steam, any
one of these invisible, intangible powers that are thrilling through
the world to-day. There never was so much room for mystery, for awe,
for poetry, for romance, as there is in the midst of our commercial
life in this nineteenth century.
This element of religion, then, is in no danger. We know nothing
ultimately. Who can tell me what a particle of matter is? Who can tell
me what a ray of light is, as it comes from a star? Who can tell me how
the movements in the particles of air striking my eye run up into nerve
and brain, and become translated into thought, into light, into form,
into motion, into all this wondrous universe that surrounds us on every
hand?
Then take the element of trust. People used to think they could trust
in their gods. Rebecca, for example, stole her father's gods, and hid
them in the trappings of her camel, and sat on them. She thought, then,
that she had a god near her who would care for her. The old Hebrew,
with an ox-team, carried his God, in a box that he called the ark, into
battle, and supposed that he had a very present help in time of need.
But we have the eternal stability and order of the universe, a God that
never forgets, a God on whom we can lean, in whom we can trust, who is
not away off in heaven, but here, closer to us than the air we breathe,
a God in whom we live and move and have our being.
And has this evolution of the religious life of the world threatened
the stability of truth? There never was a time on earth when there was
such a passion for truth as there is today. What means all this intense
activity of the scientific world? these men that devote their lives to
some little fraction of the universe which they study through their
microscope, not for pay, to find one little fragment of the truth of
God; these critics that are rummaging the dust-heaps of the ages in
the hope that they may find one little, bright-glittering particle of
truth in the midst of the rubbish? There never was such a passion for
truth as there is here and now.
Are we going to lose the sense of righteousness which is the very heart
of religion? There never was a time since the world began when the
average man cared so much for righteousness, when he laid so much
emphasis on human conduct, on kindness, on help, on all those things
that make this life of ours desirable and sweet. The ideal of character
and behavior has risen step by step from the beginning, and is higher
to-day than it ever was before. Not because men fear a whipping, not
because they are threatened with hell in another world, not because a
God of vengeance is preached to them, because they have grown to see
the beauty of righteousness, because they know that obedience to the
laws of God means health, means sanity, means peace, means prosperity,
means well-being, means all high and good and noble things. This
righteousness is not driven into one by blows from outside: it blossoms
out from the intellect and the conscience and the heart, as the
recognized law of all fine and desirable and human living.
What are we losing, then, as the result of this growth of the world in
accordance with the law of evolution? Are we losing our hope of the
future? The form of that hope is passing away. We no longer believe in
an underground world of the dead, as the Hebrews did. We no longer
believe in a heaven just above the blue, as Christendom has believed
for so long. We no longer believe in a heaven where all struggle and
thought and study and growth are left out, where there is to be only a
monotonous enjoyment that would pall upon any living rational soul. The
form of it is passing away; but there never was a time when there was
such a great and inspiring hope, not simply for myself and my friends,
not simply for my neighbors, not simply for my particular church. There
never was a time when there was such a great hope, including humanity
for this world and for the next, as that which inspires us now.
Nothing, then, in religion that is of any worth has the world forgotten
or is it likely to forget. All the old reverences and loves and trusts
and inspirations and hopes and tendernesses are here intermingled. They
are in the highest and noblest people; and they are being carried on
and refined and purified and glorified as the world goes on.
And now let me suggest one thought more that may be of comfort to some.
A great many people have been accustomed to associate so much of their
religion with the forms of their religious expression that they fancy
that the world's outgrowing these means that religion is being
outgrown. I said, you remember, when touching upon government as an
illustration of the working of the law of evolution, that governmental
forms were being outgrown just as fast as the world was becoming
civilized. If this world ever becomes perfect, government will cease to
be, in the sense of these external forms, simply because there will be
no need of it; just as you take down a staging when you have completed
a house. So I look forward to less and less care for the external forms
of the religious life. I believe they will remain, and they ought to
remain, just as long as they are any practical help to anybody; but,
because a person ceases to need them, you must not think that he has
ceased to be religious. When the world gets to be perfectly religious,
there will be no need of any churches, there will be no need any more
of preachers, there will be no need of any of the external ceremony of
religion.
You remember what the old seer says in the book of Revelation, as he
looks forward to the perfect condition of things. He is picturing that
ideal city which he saw in his vision coming down from God out of
heaven. This was his poetical way of setting forth his idea of the
perfected condition of humanity; and he said, speaking of that city,
"And I saw no temple therein, for the Lord God was the temple of it."
The external forms pass away when the life needs them no more. Take,
for example, the condition of things when Jesus came to Jerusalem. You
know how they put him to death. And what did they put him to death for?
They put him to death because he preached of a time when there would be
no need of any temple, no need of any priesthood, no need of any of the
external things that they regarded as essential to religious life. They
thought he was blaspheming, they thought he was an enemy of God and of
his fellowmen, because he talked that way. He said to the woman of
Samaria, You think you must worship God on this mountain, Gerizim, and
the Jews think they must worship him on Mount Moriah; but God is
spirit, and the time will come when you will not care whether you are
in this place or that, but will worship him in spirit and in truth.
You see it was just along these lines that Jesus was preaching and
working in his day. So, when humanity becomes perfected, external
forms, that have helped mould and shape man into his perfection, will
be needed no more. They will fall off, pass away, and be forgotten; but
that will not mean that humanity has forgotten or left behind any great
essential to the religious life. It will mean simply that he has taken
them up into his own heart, absorbed them into his life. He naturally
drops them when he is no longer in need of external supports.
This law of evolution, then, is simply the method of God's progress
from the beginning, the same method which was to be found in the
lowest, the method which has lifted us to where we are, the method
which looks out with promise towards the better things which are to
come.
The one life thrilled the star-dust through,
In nebulous masses whirled,
Until, globed like a drop of dew,
Shone out a new-made world.
The one life on the ocean shore,
Through primal ooze and slime,
Crept slowly on from less to more
Along the ways of time.
The one life in the jungles old,
From lowly creeping things,
Did ever some new form unfold,
Swift feet or soaring wings.
The one life all the ages through
Pursued its wondrous plant
Till, as the tree of promise grew,
It blossomed into man.
The one life reacheth onward still;
As yet no eye may see
The far-off fact, man's dream fulfill?
The glory yet to be.