Evolution cannot, then, be justly charged with materialism. On the contrary, it especially demands a divine creative force as the starter of its processes and the endower of the atoms with their peculiar properties. The foundation of that scientific system which the greatest of modern expositors of Evolution has built up about that principle (Herbert Spencer’s synthetic philosophy) is the persistence of an infinite, eternal, and indestructible force, of which all things that we see are the manifestations.
To suppose, as many of the camp-followers of the evolution philosophy do, that the processes of successive change and gradual modification, which have been so clearly traced out in nature, relieve us from the need or right of asking for any anterior and higher cause of these processes; or that because the higher and finer always unfolds from the lower and coarser, therefore there was really nothing else in existence, either at the beginning or at present, than these crude elements which alone disclose themselves at first; and that these gross, sensuous facts are the only source and explanation of all that has followed them,—this is a most superficial and inadequate view. For this explanation, as we have already noticed, furnishes no fountain-head of power to maintain the constant upward-mounting of the waters in the world’s conduits. It furnishes no intelligent directions of these streams into ever wise and ordered channels. To explain the higher life that comes out of these low beginnings, we must suppose the existence of spiritual powers, unseen at first, and disclosing themselves only in the fuller, later results, the moral and spiritual phenomena that are the crowning flower and fruit of the long process. When a thing has grown from a lower to a higher form, its real rank in nature is not shown by what it began in, but by what it has become. Though chemistry has grown out of alchemy, and astronomy out of astrology, this does not empty them of present truth or impair at all their authority and trustworthiness to-day. Though man’s mind has grown out of the sensations of brutish ancestors, that does not take away the fact that he has now risen to a height from which he overlooks all these mists and sees the light which never was on sea or land. The real beginning of a statue is not in the rough outline in which it first appears, but in the creative idea of the perfect work which regulates its whole progress. The real nature of a tree is not to be discovered in the first swellings of the acorn, or the first out-pushing of its rootlets, but rather are acorn and rootlet themselves parts of that generic idea, that evolutive potentiality, which is only to be understood when manifested in its completer form in the full-grown monarch of the forest. So to discern the real character and motor-power of the world’s evolution, we must look, not to its beginnings, but to its end, and see in the latest stages, and its highest moral and spiritual forms and forces, not disguises of its earlier stages, but ampler manifestations of that Divine power and purpose which is the ever-active agent, working through all the varied levels of creation.
The evolution theory is, also, it must be acknowledged, hostile to that phase of theology which conceives of God as a being outside of nature; which regarded the universe as a dead lump, a mechanical fabric where the Creator once worked, at the immensely remote dawn of creation; and to which again, for a few short moments, this transcendental Power stooped from His celestial throne, when the successive species of living beings were called into being in brief exertions of supernatural energy. But this mechanical view of God who, as Goethe said, “only from without should drive and twirl the universe about,” what a poor conception of God, after all, was that; not undeserving the ridicule of the great German.
Certainly, the idea of God which Wordsworth has given us, as a Power not indefinitely remote, but ever present and infinitely near,
“A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,
And rolls through all things,”
is a much more inspiring and venerable thought. This is the conception of God that Paul has given us, “the God in whom we live and move and have our being;” this is the conception that the book of Wisdom gives us, “as the Divine Spirit who filleth the world.”
And to this conception of God, Evolution has no antagonism, but on the contrary, throws its immense weight in its favor. Evolution, in fact, instead of removing the Deity from us, brings him close about us; sets us face to face with his daily activities. The universe is but the body of which God is the soul; “the Interior Artist,” as Giordano Bruno used to say, who from within moulds his living shapes of beauty and power. What else, in fact, is Evolution but the secular name for the Divine Indwelling; the scientific alias for the growth and progressive revelation of the Holy Spirit, daily putting off the old and putting on the new; constantly busy from the beginning of time to this very day moulding and forwarding his work?
Not long ago I came across the mental experience of a working geologist which well illustrates this. “Once in early boyhood,” says Mr. James E. Mills, “I left a lumberman’s camp at night to go to the brook for water. It was a clear, cold, moonlight night and very still, except the distant murmuring of the Penobscot at some falls. A sense of the grandeur of the forest and rivers, the hills, and sky, and stars came over the boy, and he stood and looked around. An owl hooted, and the hooting was not a cheerful sound. The men were all asleep, and the conditions were lonely enough. But there was no feeling of loneliness; for with the sense of the grandeur of creation, came the sense, very real and strong, of the Creator’s presence. In boyish imagination, I could see His almighty hand shaping the hills and scooping out the valleys, spreading the sky overhead, and making trees, animals, and men. Thirty years later I camped alone in the open air on the bank of the Gila. It was a clear, cold, moonlight night. The camp-fire was low, for the Apaches were on the warpath. An owl again hooted; but again all loneliness was dispelled by a sense of the Creator’s presence, and the night of long ago by the Penobscot came into my mind, and with it the question: What is the difference to my mind between the Creator’s presence now and then? To the heart, it was very like, but to the mind very different. Now, no great hand was shaping things from without. But God was everywhere, reaching down through long lines of forces, and shaping and sustaining things from within. I had been travelling all day by mountains of lava which had cooled long ages ago, and over grounds which the sea, now far off, had left on its beaches; and with the geologist’s habit recalled the lava still glowing and flowing, and the sea still rolling its pebbles on the beaches. But now I knew it was by forces within the earth that the lava was poured out, and that the waves which rolled the pebbles were driven by the wind and the wind by the sun’s heat. And the forces within the earth and the heat within the sun come from still further within. Inward, always inward, the search for the original energy and law carried my mind, for He whose will is the source of all force, and whose thought is the source of all law is on the inside of the universe. The kingdom of God is within you.”