“Now this change from the boyish idea of God creating things from without, to the manhood’s view of God creating and sustaining all things from within,” is indeed as this working geologist so well says, “the essential change which modern science has wrought in the habit of religious thought. From Copernicus to Darwin, every important step in the development of science has cost the giving up of some idea of a God creating things as man shapes them from without, and has illustrated the higher idea of God reaching His works from within. Every step has led toward the truth that life and force come to the forms in which they are clothed from God by the inner way; and by the same way, their law comes with them; and that the forms are the effects of the force and life, acting according to the law.”
This is certainly a most noble, uplifting conception of the world. But how, perhaps it will be asked, can we find justification for such a view of the Divine Spirit as indwelling in nature? It is a question worth dwelling upon, and when we carefully ponder it, we find that one of the phases of the evolution philosophy that has been a chief source of alarm is precisely the one that lends signal support to this doctrine of Divine Indwelling.
Evolution is especially shrunk from, because it connects man so closely with nature; our souls are traced back to an animal origin; consciousness to instinct, instinct to sensibility, and this to lower laws and properties of force. By the law of the correlation of forces, our mental and spiritual powers are regarded as but transformed phases of physical forces, conditioned as they are on our bodily states and changes; and the soul, it is said, is but a child of nature, who is most literally its mother.
To many minds this is appalling. But let us look it candidly in the face and see its full bearing. We will recall in the first place, the scientific law, no life but from proceeding life. Let us recollect next the dictum of mechanics, no fountain can rise higher than its source. The natural corollary and consequence of this is “no evolution without preceding involution.” If mind and consciousness come out of nature, they must first have been enveloped in nature, resident within its depths. If the spirit within our hearts is one with the force that stirs the sense and grows in the plant, then that sea of energy that envelops us is also spirit.
When we come to examine the idea of force, we find that there is only one form in which we get any direct knowledge of it, only one place in which we come into contact with it, and that is, in our own conscious experiences, in the efforts of our own will. According to the scientific rule, always to interpret the unknown by the known, not the known by the unknown, it is only the rational conclusion that force elsewhere is also will. Through this personal experience of energy, we get, just once, an inside view of the universal energy, and we find it to be spiritual; the will-force of the Infinite Spirit dwelling in all things. That the encircling force of the universe can best be understood through the analogy of our own sense of effort, and therefore is a form of will, of Spirit, is a conclusion endorsed by the most eminent men of science,—Huxley, Herschel, Carpenter, and Le Conte. There is, therefore, no real efficient force but Spirit. The various energies of nature are but different forms or special currents of this Omnipresent Divine Power; the laws of nature, but the wise and regular habits of this active Divine will; physical phenomena but projections of God’s thought on the screen of space; and Evolution but the slow, gradual unrolling of the panorama on the great stage of time.
In geology and paleontology, as is admitted, Evolution is not directly observed, but only inferred. The process is too slow; the stage too grand for direct observation. There is one field and only one where it has been directly observed. This is in the case of domestic animals and plants under man’s charge. Now as here, where alone we see Evolution going on, it is under the guidance of superintending mind, it is a justifiable inference that in nature, also, it goes on under similar intelligent guidance. Now, it is the observation of distinguished men of science that we see precisely such guidance in nature. There is nothing in the Darwinian theory, as I said, that would conduct species upward rather than downward. To account for the steady upward progress we must resort to a higher Cause. We must say with Asa Gray, “Variation has been led along certain beneficial lines, like a stream along definite and useful lines of irrigation.” We must say with Prof. Owen, “A purposive route of development and change, of correlation and inter-dependence, manifesting intelligent will, is as determinable in the succession of races as in the development and organization of the individual. Generations do not vary accidentally in any and every direction, but in pre-ordained, definite, and correlated courses.” This judgment is one which Prof. Carpenter has also substantially agreed with, declaring that the history of Evolution is that of a consistent advance along definite lines of progress, and can only be explained as the work of a mind in nature.
The old argument from Design, it has been frequently said of late, is quite overthrown by Evolution. In one sense it is: i.e. the old idea of a special purpose and a separate creation of each part of nature. But the divine agency is not dispensed with, by Evolution; only shifted to a different point of application; transferred from the particular to the general; from the fact to the law. Paley compared the eye to a watch; and said it must have been made by a divine hand. The modern scientist objects that the eye has been found to be no hand-work; it is the last result of a complicated combination of forces; the mighty machine of nature, which has been grinding at the work for thousands of years. Very well; but the modern watch is not made by hand, either, but by a score of different machines. But does it require less, or not more intelligence to make the watch in this way? Or if some watch should be discovered that was not put together by human hand, but formed by another watch, not quite so perfect as itself, and this by another watch, further back, would the wonder, the demand for a superior intelligence as the origin of the process be any the less? It strikes me that it would be but the greater. The farther back you go, and the more general, and invariable, and simple the fundamental laws that brought all things into their present form, then, it seems to me, the more marvellous becomes the miracle of the eye, the ear, each bodily organ, when recognized as a climax to whose consummation each successive stage of the world has contributed. How much more significant of purposive intelligence than any special creation is this related whole, this host of co-ordinated molecules, this complex system of countless interwoven laws and movements, all driven forward, straight to their mark, down the vistas of the ages, to the grand world consummation of to-day? What else but omniscience is equal to this?
All law, then, we should regard as a divine operation; and all divine operation, conversely, obeys law. Whatever phenomena we consider as specially divine ought, then, to be most orderly and true to nature. Religion, as far as it is genuine, must, therefore, be natural. It should be no exotic, no foreign graft, as it is often regarded, but the normal outgrowth of our native instincts. Evolution does not banish revelation from our belief. Recognizing in man’s spirit a spark of the divine energy, “individuated to the power of self-consciousness and recognition of God,” as Le Conte aptly phrases it; tracing the development of the spirit-embryo through all geologic time till it came to birth and independent life in man, and humanity recognized itself as a child of God, the communion of the finite spirit with the infinite is perfectly natural. This direct influence of the spirit of God on the spirit of man, in conscience speaking to him of the moral law, through prophet and apostle declaring to us the great laws of spiritual life and the beauty of holiness,—this is what we call revelation. The laws which it observes are superior laws, quite above the plane of material things. But the work of revelation is not, therefore, infallible or outside the sphere of Evolution. On the contrary, one of the most noticeable features of revelation is its progressive character. In the beginning, it is imperfect, dim in its vision of truth, often gross in its forms of expression. But from age to age it gains in clearness and elevation. In religion, as in secular matters,—it is the lesson of the ages, that “the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.”
How short-sighted, then, are they who seek to compress the broadening vision of modern days within the narrow loopholes of mediæval creeds. “There is still more light to break from the words of Scripture,” was the brave protest of Robinson to the bigots of his day. And as we say Amen to that, we may add: “Yes, and more light still to come from the whole heavens and the whole earth.” If we wish to see that light and receive the richest rewards of God’s revealing word, we must face the sun of truth and follow bravely forward.
As we look back upon the long path of Evolution up which God’s hand has already led humanity; as we see from what lowliness and imperfection, from what darkness and grossness God has led us to our present heritage of truth and spiritual life, can we doubt, that, if we go forward obediently, loyal to reason, we shall not find a new heavens and more glorious, above our head, a new earth and a nobler field of work beneath our feet?