This application of the abstract doctrine of Evolution gives it an
enormous and startling expansion: so enormous and so startling that the
doctrine itself seems absolutely new. To say that the present grows by
regular law out of the past is one thing; to say that it has grown out
of a distant past in which as yet the present forms of life upon the
earth, the present vegetation, the seas and islands and continents, the
very planet itself, the sun and moon, were not yet made--and all this
also by regular law--that is quite another thing. And the bearings of
this new application of Science deserve study.
Now it seems quite plain that this doctrine of Evolution is in no sense
whatever antagonistic to the teachings of Religion, though it may be,
and that we shall have to consider afterwards, to the teachings of
revelation. Why then should religious men independently of its relation
to revelation shrink from it, as very many unquestionably do? The reason
is that, whilst this doctrine leaves the truth of the existence and
supremacy of God exactly where it was, it cuts away, or appears to cut
away, some of the main arguments for that truth.
Now, in regard to the arguments whereby we have been accustomed to prove
or to corroborate the existence of a Supreme Being, it is plain that, to
take these arguments away or to make it impossible to use them, is not
to disprove or take away the truth itself.
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