Here, however, we must remember that creation, as maintained against such materialistic evolution, whether by theology, philosophy, or Holy Scripture, is necessarily a continuous, nay, an eternal influence, not an intervention of disconnected acts. It is the true continuity, which includes and binds together all other continuity.
It is here that natural science meets with theology, not as an antagonist, but as a friend and ally in its time of greatest need; and I must here record my belief that neither men of science nor theologians have a right to separate what God in Holy Scripture has joined together, or to build up a wall between nature and religion, and write upon it “no thoroughfare.” The science that does this must be impotent to explain nature and without hold on the higher sentiments of man. The theology that does this must sink into mere superstition.
In the light of all these considerations, whether bearing on our knowledge or our ignorance, a higher and deeper question presents itself, namely, that as to the relation of nature and of man to a Personal Creator. To this it seems to me that the study of the succession of life yields no uncertain reply. Call the progress of life an evolution if you will; trace it back to primæval Protozoa, or to a congeries of atoms: still the truth remains that nothing can be evolved out of these primitive materials except what they originally contained. Now we find in the existence of man, and in the tendency of the scheme of nature towards his introduction, evidence that at least all that is involved in the reasoning and moral nature of man must have existed potentially before atoms began to shape themselves into crystals or into organic forms. Nay, more than this is implied, for we do not know that man and what he has hitherto been and done constitute the ultimate perfection of nature, and we must suspect that something much more than what we see in man must be required for the origination of the chain of life. What does this prove, in any sense in which human reason can understand it? Nothing less, it seems to me, than that doctrine of the Almighty Divine Logos, or Creative Reason, as the cause of all things, asserted in our sacred Scriptures, and held in one form or another by all the greatest thinkers who have attempted to deal with the question of origins. Falling back on this great truth, whether presented to us in the simple “God said” of Genesis, or in the more definite form of the New Testament, “The Word was with God, and the Word was God,” we find ourselves in the presence of a Divine plan pervading all the ages of the earth’s history and culminating in man, who presents for the first time the image and likeness of the Divine Maker; and this forms the true nexus of all the separate chains of life. Had man never existed, such reasoning might have been speculative merely, but the existence of man, taken in connection with the progress of the plan which has terminated in his advent, proves the existence of God.
Divine revelation carries us a step farther, and teaches us to recognise in Jesus of Nazareth God manifest in the flesh, the Divine Logos dwelling among men. But though this is a doctrine of revelation and not of science, it is in perfect harmony with the plan of progress which we have been sketching. It is the natural outcome of a process leading to the introduction of a rational and accountable being, understanding something of the works and ways of God, that to him God should reveal Himself, and that the Divine Logos, by whom were “constituted the ages”[94] of the world’s geological history, should preside also over its future consummation, when all the degradation that has sprung from the aberrations of fallen and imperfect humanity shall be removed, and man himself shall become fully a partaker of the Divine nature.
The world we live in is thus not necessarily a finished world, and it is now marred by the sins of man. What it may be in the future, we can perhaps as little guess as an intelligence studying the Palæozoic world could have understood that of the present time. But it is a glorious truth to know that our Maker has revealed Himself to us also as a Saviour, and that as individuals we shall not perish, to be replaced by an improved species in the future, but that we ourselves, as sons of God, may enter into and possess the new earth and new heavens of future æons of the universe. Thus it would seem that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that which was wanting to complete and justify the history of nature by bringing to light the final “restitution of all things,” and our own union to God in a happy immortality.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Croll has elaborated this calculation in his work, Climate and Time.
[2] Sept. 1879.
[3] Analyses recently made by Mr. C. Hoffman, of the Geological Survey of Canada, show that beds of graphitic gneiss, some of them 8 feet in thickness, contain as much as 25·5 to 30 per cent. of carbon, the remaining earthy matter consisting principally of silica, alumina, and lime. The graphite from veins was nearly pure carbon, containing from 97·6 to 99·8 per cent. of that substance.