Now here is a passage from a book, “Evolution and the War,” by Professor
Metchnikoff’s translator, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, which comes even closer
to our conception of God as an immortal being arising out of man, and
external to the individual man. He has been discussing that well-known
passage of Kant’s: “Two things fill my mind with ever-renewed wonder and
awe the more often and deeper I dwell on them--the starry vault above
me, and the moral law within me.”
From that discussion, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell presently comes to this most
definite and interesting statement:
“Writing as a hard-shell Darwinian evolutionist, a lover of the scalpel
and microscope, and of patient, empirical observation, as one who
dislikes all forms of supernaturalism, and who does not shrink from the
implications even of the phrase that thought is a secretion of the brain
as bile is a secretion of the liver, I assert as a biological fact that
the moral law is as real and as external to man as the starry vault. It
has no secure seat in any single man or in any single nation. It is the
work of the blood and tears of long generations of men. It is not
in man, inborn or innate, but is enshrined in his traditions, in his
customs, in his literature and his religion. Its creation and sustenance
are the crowning glory of man, and his consciousness of it puts him in
a high place above the animal world. Men live and die; nations rise and
fall, but the struggle of individual lives and of individual nations
must be measured not by their immediate needs, but as they tend to the
debasement or perfection of man’s great achievement.”
This is the same reality. This is the same Link and Captain that this
book asserts. It seems to me a secondary matter whether we call Him
“Man’s Great Achievement” or “The Son of Man” or the “God of Mankind” or
“God.” So far as the practical and moral ends of life are concerned, it
does not matter how we explain or refuse to explain His presence in our
lives.
There is but one possible gap left between the position of Dr. Chalmers
Mitchell and the position of this book. In this book it is asserted that
GOD RESPONDS, that he GIVES courage and the power of self-suppression to
our weakness.