I gladly avail myself of the opportunity which the recent Church Congress at Shrewsbury gives me to think out audibly my thoughts upon Evolution and Immortality. It is a subject, indeed, which has a grave importance for us, now that clergy and schools are getting alike infected with that which leads so palpably away from Scripture at the outset, and gives whatever is pleased to assume the garb of "science" a free hand to fashion all our most sacred convictions after its own pleasure.

I do not believe that Scripture was not intended to teach science. Most plainly, all the foundations of true science are in it, in its revelation of the relation of all things to God. Why is it, indeed, that "science," in its attempts to formulate its beliefs, manages so to run up against Scripture, but because Scripture is standing guard there to prevent man's thoughts from breaking bounds? And it does this
effectually where there is proper faith in it. What form of evolution, many as there are, could against nature bring Eve out of Adam? Certainly none. God has put there the miraculous in too definite a way for any to escape from it.

Now it was against the doctrine of special creation -which that of Eve is if it is anything-that Darwin distinctly set himself with full purpose of heart. "He tells us himself," says Prof. Mivart, "that in his 'Origin of Species' his first object was 'to show that species had not been separately created;' and he consoles himself for admitted error by the reflection that 'I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.' "

Yet he had admitted, in that very book, "a few forms, or one," into which "the Creator had breathed life!" Yes, insincerely:to sweeten the pill that he was presenting to his readers! "I have long regretted " he says afterwards, "that I truckled to public opinion, and used the pentateuchal term 'creation,' by which I really meant ' appeared' by some wholly unknown process."

And this is the man of whom the chairman of the Church Congress says:" It maybe said of him, as of so many humble seekers after truth, in the language of the Lord through the mouth of the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, ' I have guided thee, though thou hast not known Me!'" Isaiah says "girded," not "guided;" but, apart from this, it is a strange notion of the way God guides His scientific prophets. "Science and Christ,"says Mr. Darwin, a short time before his death, "have nothing to do with each other, except in as far as the habit of scientific investigation makes a man cautious about accepting any proof. As far as I am concerned, I do not believe that any revelation has ever been made. With regard to a future life, every one must draw his own conclusions from vague and contradictory probabilities."

Alas, if the Bishop of Hereford should be right, and "so many humble seekers after truth" are "guided" in this fashion! not merely guided, but constituted guides for those who are in the full light of Christianity. But this is nothing short of blasphemy. "Everyone that is of the truth," says another and far different speaker, " heareth My voice " (John 8:37).

Spite of the "caution about accepting any proof" which science had taught him, Mr. Darwin says as to the matter of his book:"I have picked up most by reading really numberless special treatises, and all agricultural and horticultural journals; but it is a work of long years. The difficulty is to know what to trust." These are his own italics; and he again recognizes the need of caution; but that avails much more to influence him as to revelation than as to his own theories. Dr. Stirling,* from whom I am borrowing here, after quoting the son's account of his father's inevitable tendency, adds:"In fact, Mr. Darwin himself makes a stronger acknowledgment for himself than his son does for him. *"Darwinianism:Workmen and Work."By J. H. Stirling, LL.D. (P. 193).* Even on the last page of the Journal, words occur which are an undeniable confession. They are these:'As the traveler stays but a short time in each place, his descriptions must generally consist of mere sketches -hence arises, as I have found to my cost, a constant tendency to fill up wide gaps of knowledge by inaccurate and superficial hypotheses.' He writes to Henslowe once:'As yet I have only indulged in hypotheses; but they are such powerful ones that, I suppose, if they were put in action for one day, the world would come to an end."… For very soberest conclusion, let us bear in mind this (2:108):'I am a firm believer that without speculation there is no good and original observation.'"

Such is the man, then, and such by his own confession the style of the book which, with the aid of some powerful backing, took the world by storm. The real success of his argument, and the way in which faith had to do with it-a faith which he had lost as to Scripture-may be estimated by what Dr. Stirling remarks in closing (p. 357).

"This is strange, too – in the whole 'Origin of Species' there is not a single word of origin! The very species which is to originate never originates, but, on the contrary, is always to the fore (p. 240). Nay, as no breeder ever yet made a new species or even a permanent race, so the Darwins themselves, both Charles and his son, Mr. Francis (pp. 268, 269), confess, 'we cannot prove that a single species has changed.'"

This is the result to which this "humble seeker after truth " attained. Having found it, face it after all he would not, but took refuge in a faith as to what he could not prove, and which ended for himself, alas, in the eclipse of hope and the loss of all that could make knowledge of any value. Even in the present life this; in that which is to come, who shall sum up the loss?

The arguments for evolution are, largely, such as have been used in many different branches of science, to prove what in the end was fully dis-proved by longer and more exact investigation. They are the fruit of a partial induction mistaken for a full one:as if one measured the growth of a child, say from five years old to ten, and found that it had grown in that time three inches in the year, and from that decided that at 50 this would be a man somewhere about 14 feet high. Only one thing would hinder such a calculation being right, but that would be quite enough:sometime between 18 and 20 this growth will cease, and the knowledge of this limit would alter the whole estimate.

No one, of course, would make such a mistake, because the limit here is familiar to us all ; but such limits unknown as to planetary variations has made men fear that all the world would go to wreck. Such calculations as to the formation of the earth have carried back the age of man upon it into a fabulous antiquity. And such observations of the abundant variations that are found continually taking place in organic beings prove for the evolutionist that all things are in flux. Somehow, notwithstanding this, the world is reasonably stable; and the admissions of the Messrs. Darwin that not a single species can be proved to have changed into another is a better argument for a limit in some way, than that from the variations for such a change as none have found as yet, however willing and anxious they might be in their folly to find it.
Christians are suffering in all this for the unbelief which expresses itself in such sayings as this, that Scripture was not intended to teach science. It was intended to teach whatever it does teach; and one truth that it does teach is better than all the conjectures of all the wisest men that ever lived, and all the volumes they have ever written. "If I have told you earthly things and ye believed not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things? " How Satan must laugh when Christians give up the earthly things as unreliable, while assuring themselves of the profound faith they have as to the unseen heavenly things?

True it is, of course, that our interpretations of Scripture need to be distinguished from Scripture itself, and that here we have need again to remember our human fallibility. The surer we may be that what we have is what the Word has taught us, the simpler we may be in letting it all be tested. Scripture is not like a hot-house plant, to which outside exposure may perhaps be fatal. The more we examine what we hold for truth, the more the truth itself will root itself in our convictions, and deliver us from the fear which makes the hearts of so many uneasy at the present day.

We cannot, if we would, shut ourselves off from the myriad forms of unbelief which assail us from every side to-day. Let us trust the faithful guide which has been given us, and go to it upon every question. It is able to furnish thoroughly the man of God. If we are such we shall not even regret the having to search the Word about these many questions. We shall not only be answered; we shall be enriched and built up by the answers. For this is the character of God's word:the "holiness of truth " is in it, and the unfailing spring which satisfies the thirst of all that come.

What answer shall we get, then, if we seek to learn what we may of God's method in creation ? An evolution there is, and a true one, not what has usurped its name:an "unfolding" of a divine plan, in which there is, of course, progress and development, upon principles which are uniform throughout. Looking at organic being, with which alone we need now concern ourselves, we have three stages of progress clearly marked off from one another:the vegetable; the animal, which is marked off as a new "creation" ; man, just as distinctly from the mere animal, by a "creation" also.

Each of these contains what has preceded it, with an addition. The vegetable is but matter, organized and controlled by vital force. The animal has vegetative functions connected with its own locomotor ones, which imply now the presence and rule of a sold. Man, again, is an animal, crowned with that which is absolutely characteristic of the being created in the image of God, the spirit.

There is economy of design which at the same time gives unity to the whole; while there is advance on the part of that also in which this unity is shown. The mineral absorbed into the vegetable can scarcely be recognized any more as mineral; and it is worked up into still higher forms as the '' flesh " of animal and of man. The " life " of the vegetable is in the animal so characterized by the soul with which it is now united, that "soul " and "life" become, in one aspect of soul, but equivalent terms. While the animal soul becomes again in man possessed of higher faculties than it ever had in the animal, and thus the fit companion and help-meet of the spirit.

Not only so:we can go beyond even this as led of the blessed book which God has given us, and after the present life see a similar advance made still. For, as soon as he leaves the body, the saint, though still having " soul," is now spoken of (as never while in the body) as a " spirit " ; and when he takes up the body again, this is now no longer a "natural"-which is, literally, a "psychical " body (a body characterized by the soul, or psyche)-but a "spiritual " body, the body of the resurrection.

Here is development, then, all along the line:of that there can be no question. God evolves (or unfolds) in this way the wondrous possibilities which lie wrapped up in what He has first produced. Here is true evolution, not the false thing of the evolutionists ; but how is it accomplished ? Is the soul developed out of the life of the plant ? or the spirit developed out of the soul of the animal ? No:at each step God must come in, and does; soul and spirit are separate creations. And how does the mineral rise into the plant structure? or this into the body of the animal ? or the soul develop in man spiritual characters unknown in the animal? The answer of Scripture is, they do not raise themselves; they are raised:the development in each case is accomplished by the descent (if we may say so) of a higher principle to unite itself with the lower. The lower is raised by the humbling of the higher to it, and the shadow of Christ is here already unmistakably seen in Nature :the seal is set upon this method as divine.

We need not wonder :"all things were created by Him and for Him," and this is His stamp on what He would approve to us as current money in the realm of thought. Why should not the figure of the king appear upon what is His? So is all nature in fact a witness for Him, a glorious interweaving of spiritual parables, which, if we had more ability to read them, would indeed transfigure the visible with the brightness of the unseen.

I have not yet come to the question of immortality, and am afraid, moreover, that as to the connection of evolution with it I have little to say that has not been often said, and which is not apparent on very slight consideration of the matter. As Mr. Wilson truly said at the Congress, "the doctrine of personal immortality . . . seems to me rendered much more difficult by the theory of evolution, because human life is by that theory so closely correlated with animal life. At what point in the chain does consciousness, freedom, personality, conscience, soul, immortality, come in?" Here is the effect of not permitting Scripture to teach science:in Scripture these all attach themselves to that human "spirit," upon the .immortality of which not the least cloud rests from Genesis to Revelation.

Of course, those who, even with the light of Scripture, find but body and soul in man, lose so far the comfort which the true doctrine will unfailingly be found to have; and " annihilation " in its many forms thrives upon this confusion. Scripture, however, is clear and consistent everywhere; and it ought to be even more scientific to believe its testimony than Mr. Darwin's memorandum-book of observations, which he tells us cannot be "good and original" without being tinged with " speculation "!

Prof. Bonney gives us the speculation without the observation. " Life," he tells us, " must be the result of a synthesis. Two hypotheses are possible:either it was some unprecedented combination of two or more inanimate things, or it was the action of an unknown external force on inanimate matter-which is tacitly admitted to be the more probable. In either case we must fall back upon a synthetic process."

The "observation" upon which Prof. Bonney grounds his first hypothesis is, of course, chemical, as his example from the formation of water shows. Life in this case must be an exceedingly rare chemical compound, which has the not less than miraculous properties (for any such) of organization, growth, and reproduction; or of communicating these to the protoplasmic fragments, which strangely co-operate (with a wisdom which utterly baffles and confounds all human knowledge) to weave all the tissues of all organized beings from man downwards. The chemical theory, always more marvelous than any Scriptural miracle, linked itself with the apparently homogeneous character of this matter of life or "protoplasm," in which the microscope could detect no organization, but in which the chemists found (after it was dead) a most complex constitution. This mere jelly, as it looked, structure less, and practically pretty uniform in character, being so complex, might have in this way its extraordinary properties; and Prof. Huxley, as is well-known, triumphantly held it up as " the formal basis of all life-the clay of the potter, which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod."

A thing of this sort chemical combination was competent to produce. Carbonic acid, water, and ammonia, he declares, "when they are brought together under certain conditions, give rise to the still more complex body, protoplasm, and this protoplasm exhibits the phenomena of life."

"Spontaneous generation " necessarily went with this, and they thought that they had proved this by experiment. Living things were claimed to have been produced in vessels from which all life had been absolutely excluded. Apart from this, a sheet of slime which had been found at the bottom of the sea was supposed to be living matter. Prof. Huxley named it before he had captured it, very suitably in honor of the infidel Haeckel, Bathybius haeckelii ("the low life of Haeckel"?), and now the super-naturalists were bidden to tremble.

Happily for them, the bubble burst (we may note that the more brilliant a bubble is, the nearer it is to bursting):the "spontaneous generation" turned out not to be spontaneous, and the discovery had to find decent burial at the hands of the very men who most wished it success; "biogenesis," or the doctrine of "all life from life," was owned, as far as the fact was concerned, whatever the hypothesis, to be "victorious along the whole line," and so remains to-day; '' bathybius " was found to be chemical enough to suit, if it had only had the "life "-sulphate of lime or gypsum; and only protoplasm remained as a text on which to preach the chemical theory.

Alas, "protoplasm " has now failed also:its apparent innocence has been proved nothing but deception. Instead of being structure less, the microscope has shown it to be full of structure-a thing that no chemist in his wildest dreams could hope to manufacture any more. What they had now to manufacture was another hypothesis.

It is no wonder, therefore, that Prof. Bonney should prefer the second view of the origin of life that he presents to us, '' the action of an unknown external force"-creative, he calls it lower down-"on inanimate matter." But then, if life be the result of a new force evoked by divine power, and that be evolution, then that hardly differs from what we have always believed, and we have talked evolution all the time without knowing it. To call it a "synthesis" does not alter it in any wise, if you allow it to be a divine intervention of which it is the result. And if this intervention once admitted makes it now scientific to believe in others afterward, we may be very glad that science and faith can go so well together. Then, by a new creative intervention, the beast can become a living soul; and by another, man be made in the image of God. Only, if you call this evolution which allows of the introduction over and over again of new and unknown forces, we shall want to have defined for us afresh what the term means. And if you call it, as Prof. Bonney does here, "the action of laws," then one of these "laws " must be that God shall be free and sovereign in His own creation, and there all Christians will heartily join hands.

And, of course, the question of immortality will then be a difficulty no longer:it will be only a question of fact. To illustrate it by the stability of a chemical compound, such as water, is idle, unless life is a chemical compound, and then there is no new force in the case. And to object the instability of organic compounds would still make it a question of chemistry merely. Vitality uses and controls the chemical forces, and the instability of the compounds is just what makes them capable of being used for its purposes. Continual change is a necessity for life itself. When it departs, the material hastens to assume more permanent forms, though that may be a poetical way of putting it:the real fact is that, released from the control of the life-principle, chemical affinities again operate unrestrictedly in it.

But not one step has been taken towards showing life itself to be a synthesis or compound of any kind. What it is we do not know. But no one would say, even of his body, that it was a compound of matter and life. No more could one say that life was a compound of matter and creative force. All the talk about "synthesis" is a scientific way of saying nothing. And who knows how creative power work?

Organic life also comes to an end-does not become invisible and float about like the vapor of water to which he compares it. Even the soul of the beast comes to an end. Spirit abides, and the soul that is united with this. But it is Scripture tells us this.

" Science'' has not the least right to say that "a conscious personal existence after death either should be a property of all living things (in which case an embodiment of some kind seems essential) or of none, and that the latter seems more probable." It depends largely on what we call ''science." If this be merely physical science, then, of course, the witness of personality, conscience, etc., will be all ignored, and man, as man, dropped out. Nay, for aught I know, we shall be mere walking vegetables, and shall not dare to call our soul our own. The fact is, God never left man to grope in this way after Himself. The light has always shone from the beginning:men have turned away from it, and walked in their own shadow. Spite of all that, it takes all the ingenuity of the sharpened wits of civilization to find out that our hope of living after death depends upon the same possibility for "all living things"-from the gnat down to the potato! In that case, we may be sure that extinction "seems most probable." But why, then, have we been mocked and made wretched by being endowed with more than the soul of a potato ?

That science which proclaims all life to be a cheat, all science itself a brief, short-lived delusion, may in the name of reason itself be declared most unreasonable-if there be any truth, false science.

How unutterably glad may we be that we are not left to this. Nature, too, proclaims that, while we may with fires of our own kindling light up our path for a little way, yet all that can be called true light is from heaven. Alas, that even this light may shine in the darkness, and the darkness comprehend it not!

[We insert the above paper, from Words in Season, not only to put its contents before our readers, but to seek to awaken amongst us a deeper interest in the truths of nature. The word of God is full of references to the world and its wonders. We may rest assured that all speaks of a wisdom and a goodness, seen alone in its perfection in the Scriptures. We may be equally sure that if the truths of nature are neglected by Christians, Satan will all the more use them as the vehicle for such infidel theories as Evolution in its various forms. What is needed is the faith which, Bible in hand, will take up nature and find it eloquent of God – not merely the Creator-but the Redeemer-God. We need not come with theories, nor seek to formulate such. The word of God has already given us, not theory but changeless truth; and all we have to do is to "ask the earth," to "consider the heavens."

May Christians be awakened as to these things. Rationalism, whether applied to nature or to revelation, is a Christless hopeless thing. It had its origin in an anti-christian movement and its end is already in view-a Christless end.

May the Lord's people take up nature in connection with the word of God. May there be Christian observers in Geology, Chemistry, Astronomy, Physics and Biology who shall seek and find Christ everywhere. ED]