ART. VII.-EVOLUTION AND MAN'S PLACE IN

NATURE.

1. Christianity and Evolution. By JAMES IVERACH, M.A., D.D., Professor of Apologetics and Exegesis of the Gospels in the Free Church College, Aberdeen; author of Is God Knowable? &c. (London, 1894.)

2. Evolution and Man's Place in Nature. By HENRY CALDERWOOD, LL.D., F.R.S.E., Professor of Moral

Philosophy, University of Edinburgh. (London, 1893.) 3. The Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man. By HENRY DRUMMOND. (London, 1894.)

IT is with a deep persuasion of the difficulties involved in any attempt to solve the mystery of creation and of man that we approach the study of these three volumes. Their appearance almost simultaneously is not a little remarkable, as testifying to the influence which the Evolution dogma exerts, and to the anxiety felt in different directions to reconcile or to adjust its claims with those of Christian truth. Nor is this any cause for astonishment when we consider how vast are the pretensions of Evolution, and how largely contemporary thought is saturated with its technical phrases. In a former article we dealt with the extraordinary confusion of thought which is generated through the attempts to trace, not merely a growth which bears some analogy to that of biological development throughout the various provinces of human knowledge the world of inorganic matter, the world of life, the world of humanity-but to insist upon an identical working of evolution through them all equally, and to assert that exactly the same process has guided the varied forces and controlled the totally distinct conditions of the worlds of matter and of mind. Against such a transference of ideas and processes, derived from the study of one branch of science, to the entire field of human knowledge, we then entered our most emphatic protest, and we abide still by the position which we then deliberately assumed. We are confirmed, moreover, in our judgment by finding that each of the works before us is convincing and conclusive in proportion to the independence of its author from submission to the evolutionary craze. Whilst Dr. Iverach combats, as we shall see, with singular perspicacity and acuteness the fundamental

1 See Church Quarterly Review, January 1894-'Natural Theology and Evolution.'

and essential principles of Evolution, and Professor Calderwood shows the serious gaps in continuity over which Mr. Drummond skips with suspicious agility, the latter is yet constrained to introduce, under the vague nomenclature of environment,' that continuous guidance of the Divine Will and Purpose which Theism since the days of Darwin has constantly affirmed and Evolution has consistently denied.

Before we proceed to the examination of the works before us, we wish to make our own standing-point unmistakable. We are not influenced in our determined hostility to Evolution, as defined by its foremost advocates, by any distrust of science, or any apprehension for the safety of Catholic Christianity. We are firmly persuaded that dogmatic faith in the eternal verities of the Gospel will eventually and always prove to be consistent with unhesitating acceptance of all clearly established scientific truth, and with this conviction it is impossible to us that God's revelation of Himself in His Word should belie His self-manifestation in His works. a time there may appear to be a contradiction between some asserted scientific discovery and some current interpretation of Holy Writ, but the Christian can afford to wait in patience for the fuller light which will be revealed in due season. At the first proclamation of the action of the law of gravitation it was eagerly welcomed by the sceptics of the day, under the impression that it tended to disprove the teaching of the Bible. But such groundless expectations soon died out and were forgotten. It is not, then, to any scientific discovery, or to any working hypothesis, which may be suggested as the probable explanation of its development within its own sphere, that we take exception, but to the unwarrantable assumptions and deductions which are based on such hypotheses, and which arrogate for a working theory the supremacy of indisputable and universal truth. We take our stand on the side of Christianity against Agnosticism, of Freedom against Determinism, of Theism against blind hazard, of Catholicism against a half-grudging Deism. We object in toto to the acceptance of any mechanical theory of the universe as ultimate, not because of any imperfection in its working, but because of the fundamental imperfection of its conception. We object in toto to the strange yet too common mistake which concludes, as soon as the method of any process is unfolded, that God did not do it. On the contrary, we regard every fresh demonstration of the universal prevalence of law as a fresh testimony to Theism, and a fresh

argument for God as the source of order and the only ground of law.

Nor will such an attitude be deemed unreasonably hostile or aggressive by those who realize the issues which are at stake. It is not too much to say that the foundation truths of the Christian faith are assailed under the mask of the evolutionary dogma. The doctrine of the Father is destroyed by the denial or the perpetual banishment of a personal God, and by such obliteration of the distinction between matter and spirit as makes Nature the efficient cause and end of all things. The doctrine of the Son is undermined by the rejection of the supernatural, which relegates the miraculous to the land of fable, treats the cardinal truth of the Resurrection as the product of an enthusiastic phantasy, and acknowledges in our Blessed Lord only the perfected natural man. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit and His procession from the Father and the Son is superseded by the theory that any renovation effected in man or in the system to which he belongs must be wrought out by agencies innate in Nature, and must proceed according to her fixed and unchanging laws. We do not say that so much is affirmed in explicit terms, but it is inevitably implied in the demands set forth in the name of Evolution, and in the scarcely veiled contempt with which any plea for the Catholic faith, as hitherto believed and understood, is regarded. Early Darwinism had been content to assume Evolution as a working hypothesis, but it was rapidly promoted, first to the rank of the most comprehensive of all phenomenal laws, and then to the throne of absolute supremacy over all Nature. Evolution is to rule everything, to account for everything, to explain everything; and that which lies beyond its influence belongs to the unthinkable and unknowable.

That this is no exaggerated assertion is clearly brought out in Dr. Iverach's opening pages :

'On all hands,' he writes, men are busy tracing out the lines of Evolution from the general to the particular, from the simple to the complex, until it is affirmed "that the whole world, living and not living, is the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of the powers possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was composed." It is evident enough that, in these views of Professor Huxley, Evolution has passed beyond the stage of a working hypothesis, and has become both a philosophy and a dogmatic faith. We are restricted to molecules, their powers, and the interactions of their powers, for the explanation of the universe; Huxley, Life of Darwin, ii. 210.

1

when the molecules are given in their primitive nebulosity, the whole result follows. There can be no increment from without, no guidance from above, nor any leading along a definite line to a predetermined end. The molecules and their interactions must be competent to produce all that has come out in the process. We need not say how great is the issue involved in this claim, or how strenuously it is to be resisted. It is something gained, however, to have the claims of Evolution considered as a dogmatic faith stated so clearly, and to know with what we have to deal."

In

Extravagant as these claims unquestionably are, there is much reason to fear that they are in a certain and a very injurious degree allowed by men who yet hold fast the profession of their Christian faith, if not without wavering. consequence they occupy an indefensible position which cannot be upheld on either philosophical or Scriptural grounds. On the scientific side of their nature they are not very refined materalists, and they keep all their spirituality for their religion in a separate part of their life. They do not attempt to reconcile the antagonism which this dualistic creed engenders. Perhaps they are hardly conscious of its existence, or have never thought it out. But the day may come when they are hard pressed to defend their position, and it will be well if faith be not shipwrecked, although the fault lies not in their creed but in their science. For it is but too often the case that men reach their scientific convictions through the exercise of their reason, whilst their religious convictions are rather emotional than rational, and when a conflict arises between that which is believed to be true, and that which is only felt to be good and noble, the result is moral unrest, and possibly spiritual paralysis and decay.

It is time, however, that we turned from these general principles to consider the three works on Evolution now before us. Their authors represent with approximate adequacy three separate lines of treatment. Each of them avowedly writes from the stand-point of a believer in Christianity, and upholds after his own fashion the doctrine of Evolution. Each of them approaches his subject from a different point of view; Dr. Iverach embracing in briefer space a larger area than his fellow-workers, and giving a rapid yet singularly discriminating résumé of the entire relation of Evolution to Christianity; whilst Professor Calderwood strictly confines himself to the question suggested by his title; and Mr. Drummond gets no further in the Ascent of Man than the rudimentary evolution of a father. The three works, taken

1 Christianity and Evolution, p. 2.

together, afford a signal example of the ambiguity which frequently lurks under terms of wide acceptance, and whose meaning is assumed to be matter of ordinary knowledge. Broadly stated, Evolution and Theism are in distinct antagonism, and the explanation which Evolution offers of the universe consists in avoiding the question of its origin, and starting from a primitive and chaotic nebulosity it deduces from so unpromising a commencement an orderly totality of molecules, whose mutual interactions have developed, without any subsequent interference ab extra, the existing state of things: the whole order of progress having been a development of the higher from the lower, the organic from the inorganic, the animal from the vegetable, the human from the animal, the mental from the material, the rational from the instinctive, in one unbroken series. Motion, life, reason, religion, none of them admitting of such a break in continuity as would be caused by the introduction of fresh creative energy. Such is the ideal which we presume Mr. Drummond accepts, but which Dr. Iverach and Professor Calderwood utterly deny, and yet the two latter accept (in a qualified sense) the name of Evolution. Let us inquire in what degree they receive it.

We regard Dr. Iverach's Christianity and Evolution, despite the small space within which it compresses discussion of the profound vital and fundamental questions which its title suggests, as a valuable contribution to the Theistic controversy. It is not often that the reader meets with a work on abstruse problems at once so witty and so wise, or finds the path by which he is led on through mazes of philosophical and scientific thought illumined by so firm a grasp of the real principles at stake, or by so felicitous a perspicuity in the statement of them. Power of expression in clean-cut intelligible phraseology is no contemptible standard of a writer's mastery of his subject, and Dr. Iverach's pages abound in such terse golden sentences, as well as in merciless analyses of the confusion of thought, and of the subtle intermixture and transference of ideas from their proper spheres to one of an entirely different nature, which characterize the works of some eminent apologists of Evolution. Here are a few examples, taken almost at random: 'When vital energies are split into processes like those of the non-living world, the essential nature of the matter in hand is lost in the splitting' (p. 92). The general laws of matter will never account for particular effects, and the particular arrangements are just the things which need to be explained' (p. 77). The per