its environment. He truly and lovingly thought of the course of nature as a wise process of development, in which the inevitable incidents of birth and death are mitigated to the unconscious actors in the drama by absence of fear and generally prompt despatch at last. He saw how the great process has ministered to the survival and multiplication of the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy. Had he given more accurate scientific expression to his great conception, he would have saved the feelings of at least a generation.

Darwin hoped that with familiarity the superficial objections of critics, who were led astray by expressions adopted for the sake of brevity, would all be forgotten. Such familiarity has been long in coming in his case. In his regard the world has been divided into two camps. In the one, as in Leslie's camp on Doon Hill, clergymen of the Dogma type have had too much influence. The rank and file under them are still unable to rise to the height of Darwin's idea of an intelligible universe interpenetrated throughout with law. They are perfectly contented with a belief in the Mosaic cosmogony, according to which a succession of mysterious words launched the various orders of being upon terrestrial existence. But the announcement of a scientific cosmogony, in which there is

no room for pantomimic transformation from chaos to cosmos, sounded in their ears like a creation of the world by Act of Parliament, which is their highest conception of law. The traditionalist, in his pious attachment to the idea of an abstract though personal God, distinct in His divine personality from the works of His hands, saw infinite danger to his idea from the semblance of merging in processes and laws the personal providence of God. It appeared to him to be either sending God into perpetual exile from His universe, or merging His personality in the abstract idea of law. The operation of a divine thought in all the processes of nature was to him rank Pantheism, destructive to his most cherished beliefs. The God of the traditionalist is not in nature, but above nature. To meet objections of this kind, perhaps a pure naturalist like Darwin was unequal. Darwin's attempted escape from the difficulty was as crude as their objection. God is not exiled, he argued. He is only removed back an infinite distance. The very ludicrousness of such a thought might have refuted it in Darwin's own mind before it came to utterance. It makes the universe a mechanical toy, albeit of most "pregnant parts," wound up by its Maker at some indefinite point of past time, and

clicking away for ever without any further interference by Him. Professor Huxley and the rest who belong to the opposing camp, share their leader's inability to grasp the whole problem. If science has its great merit in turning the chaos of particular experience into a cosmos, it has the defect of making its disciples short-sighted in more than a physical sense. They have admirable vision, each within his own sphere, and they can startle the laity by showing them what a universe of wonder may lie within a square yard of common ground. But they blink helplessly in the effort to scan the wide horizon, and note the bearings of peak to peak and of sea to sea over the habitable globe of mind. Every man in his own order. To one is given the microscopic vision of the average scientist. To another the world-grasping power of a Newton, a Hegel, a Darwin. Even these latter are more the chosen prophets of divine thoughts too great for them to master than absolute monarchs of Media or Persia. No Minerva ever sprang full-panoplied from the head of Jove. That was a vain conceit of the pert and promising childhood of Greece. Even the Divine was born into the world a little child. The greatest thought that ever dropped from heaven's height into our terrestrial life must be

brooded over by generations to attain its complete birth. The scientific mind is too busy picking up grains of fact in the present and peeping over the wall of harvested truth into fresh fields of ripening crops, to brood in maternal patience over the great thoughts of the past. On the other hand, the traditionalist says no to Darwin's thought. He revels too much in abstractions, has too little in common with the concrete world, to part willingly with his regal abstraction whereby he has divorced God from His world. To minds of that order, now happily far from numerous in the Churches, it is impious to hint that God will be found in the still small voice of the great movement of nature. We need not be surprised when even minds of a different order can "see nothing of the slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages; and then so imperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we see only that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were.' "Though the face of nature remains for long periods of time uniform, the merest trifle would give the victory to one organic being over another." So the traditionalist, driven from the shelter of Paley's watchmaker teleology by the civil war which he thinks Darwin has revealed within the

system of wheels, can only mumble his abstractions, while he awaits the day when Darwin shall cease from troubling.

Professor Huxley, in the interesting chapter contributed by him to the Life and Letters of Darwin, expresses the opinion that the theory of evolution does not come into contact with Theism considered as a philosophical doctrine. But that is just as evolution is regarded. It has a close and damaging enough contact with Theism if, as Professor Huxley says in a recent article, it lands us in the conception of the sentient world being governed by a non-moral intellectual principle indifferent to moral desert. Apart from a supernatural revelation, Theism, the doctrine of a moral governor of the universe, stands or falls according as God is or is not found in nature. The laws of thought compel us to explain man like other organic beings by natural causation. If by Lyell's principle we are bound to explain the past by the present, we are as much bound to explain the present by the past. The truth of Lyell's principle lies really in this, that to know anything, we must be able to set it in intelligible relation to the totality of experience. This is what we do when we account for anything by natural causation. We must so account for man and his beliefs. And