THOUGHT XXIV.

EVOLUTION AS A TRUE THEORY.

"Even the poorest aspect of Nature, especially of living Nature, is a type and manifestation of the Invisible Spirit that works in Nature. He is wise who discerns Wisdom in unpretending forms, and recognizes her royal features under week-day vesture .. Late in man's history, but clearly it becomes manifest that Mind is stronger than matter, that Mind is the Creator and Shaper of matter."-THOMAS CARLYLE.

"The laws of nature are the thoughts of God."-Ersted.

THEOLOGIANS do not object to an interpretation of Creation by the scientific theory of Evolution. They know that the divine account, expressive of orderly development, reveals a wonderful process, which renders inexcusable the atheistic abuse of science. The blowhole of a shark may be the prototype of a human ear, the science of Embryology may indicate that the rudimentary forms of a man represent the fashions of his forefathers, and a curious African toad may be the very earliest existing thing with toe and finger nails like those of a human being. Suppose that worms, fishes, reptiles, men, are steps in the process of ascent, this orderly development is proof of prearrangement; and as uniformity can never, of itself, bring in variety, otherwise the effect exceeds the cause, variety indicates the pre

sence of some all-pervading directive energy. An artist may depict a flower, God only can create a law that shall make a flower.

The history of life is that portion of modern science with which extreme theorists have most unfairly dealt. They forge all missing links, and assume a practically unlimited time, though, if we adopt Professor Dana's estimate, we have only forty-eight millions of years since the Cambrian Period; and by Sir William Thomson's calculation one hundred millions from the beginning of a solid crust. Simple plants first existed, animals of low grade were introduced almost simultaneously, and the life of both originated in the waters. Thence till now the great laws of physical nature have been the same. The same plans of organic structure, with modifications, prevail everywhere; and not by a mere combination of physical forces; for life, as a force, or combination of forces, is in antagonism to all other forces. The earliest known life, Eozoön, was a member of that lowest grade of Protozoa, Foraminifera, which has lived through all geological time, and still abounds in the sea. There was advance to more complex forms, and again and again. return to the more primitive types. New forms swarmed into existence, and old forms perished; nevertheless, the oldest known forms of life are still found among the newest. There is no decided break in the continuity of marine life. Amongst sponges, the most mechanically perfect, those of lattice-work plan, are the earliest. Corals are neither more nor less elevated than their predecessors. Moss-corals (Bryozoa) are in modern seas similar to those of the Early Palæozoic. The complex and highly organized form of the Trilobite appears suddenly

in the Early Cambrian, and all the types of invertebrate marine life break upon us in successive influx of new forms; not gradual, but intermittent; not so much in a struggle for existence as by expansion under favourable circumstances. As for plant life on the land, there was a long continuance and frequent changes of species of acrogenous plants without any perceptible elevation. Fishes like the Lancelet, of soft and perishable bodies, may have preceded all others; but it is remarkable that groups of old-fashioned fishes (Ganoids) are in some respects highest, and approach nearest to reptiles. The earliest known air-breathers are insects, allied to modern May-flies. Reptiles and birds, of somewhat different superstructures, are raised upon one and the same ground-plan. Modern plants are correlated with modern animals the highest of both appeared together. There was a simultaneous appearance of many of the modern forms in the Cretaceous era; and by rapid introduction, with ordinal differentiation, speedy culmination, and early decadence of many types, came the Tertiary placental mammals. The gradual advance of braindevelopment in the Tertiary mammals presaged the mastery of mind; but, in man, the mental powers so exceed physical organization as not to culminate but to revolutionize the scheme of organic nature. The old was put to new use, varied arts entered, thought advanced into the domain of general and abstract truth. Henceforth, victory is not with brute force, but on the side of will and intelligence. The earliest men were of average stature, powerful muscular development, large brain, altogether men. The vast leap was part of a wonderful and yet continuing process. The many chains of life.

are not disunited and scattered: but coming forth from God they return to God; unity in increasing complexity marks the whole process. In periods of expansion came new forms, and the times of contraction were those of extinction. The periodicity of introduction was, as tides, preceded and followed by receding flow. The development was not that of embryonic conditions; the conditions and agents were altogether different ; but a curious analogy in some of the steps has furnished atheistic men with partial and delusive arguments. The thoroughfare is from the unseen. Science cannot explain it by atheistic theory as if the small, the weak, the low, made the great, the strong, the high, by infinitesimal additions. or increments-that would be nonsense. "Both science and religion teach us that our consciousness is continually acted upon through the medium of matter and its forces, by an infinite, unceasing, omnipresent, and resistless First Cause; and a general knowledge of science supports the hypothesis that occult powers may exist which we have not yet discovered" (G. Gore, F.R.S., "Scientific Discovery," p. 127).

We offer germs of various thoughts concerning evolution, for illustration of the means whereby the Almighty works manifold processes: Supernatural and Natural, Miraculous and Common, Idealistic and Materialistic. The Supernatural, Miraculous, Idealistic, are modes in which the Supreme transcends all the, at present, ascertained laws of the universe.

The atheistic materialist discerns merely the Natural and Common-not the brighter features in them, not the true meaning of the space-filling stuff of the universe. In refusing to allow that there is an Intelligent Author,

and in asserting that the only intelligence of which we have any experience is a consequent of matter, he is guilty of twofold error: 1, in thinking that the intelligible order of things by which life and intelligence are possible-is eternal, or came into being without aid of life and intelligence; 2, in believing that the universe, which is neither eternal nor self-made in any of its parts, is either eternal or self-made in the whole of those parts. No other stupidity, or credulity, or superstition, can equal this.

"Vis consili expers."

HORACE, iii. 465.

“ Ρώμη ἀμαθής.”

EURIPIDES, Frag.

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. . . finita potestas denique quoique Quanam fit ratione, atque alte terminus hærens."

LUCRET., i. 77.

Scientific men know that the inorganic ascends so gradually into the organic, the dead quickens so imperceptibly into life, the unintelligent brightens with such indistinguishable growth and grade of illumination, that no man is able to state how, when, where, one ends and the other begins. The supernatural and natural are inseparable: one is the essence, the other is the manifestation. One of the most positively asserted laws of nature is "the phenomena in the past determine all phenomena in succeeding time," in other words "the subsequent state of the world is the effect of the previous state;" but this cannot be proved. In fact, the universe will never return to exactly the same state in which it was at any previous moment. Whether the universeat two successive instants—is connected as a whole; or