The Passing of Evolution 19 physicists. Amid the unceasing motion of these atoms there somehow appeared, according to him, the orderly forms and the living processes of nature. Modern evolutionary speculations have not made much real progress over those of the ancients. As already remarked, they are, in their bolder forms atheistic; while in their mild- er forms they are “deistic”—admitting, indeed, the agency of God at the beginning, but nowhere else. The attempt, how- ever, to give the doctrine standing through Darwin’s theory of the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection has not been successful; for at best, that theory can enlarge but lit- tle our comprehension of the adequacy of resident forces to produce and conserve variations of species, and cannot in the least degree banish the idea of design from the process. It is, therefore, impossible to get any such proof of evo- lution as shall seriously modify our conception of Chris- tianity. The mechanism of the universe is so complicated that no man can say that it is closed to Divine interference. Especially is this seen to be the case since we know that the free will of man does pierce the joints of nature’s harness and interfere with its order to a limited extent. Man, by cultivation, makes fruits and flowers grow where otherwise weeds would cover the ground. Man makes ten thousand combinations of natural forces which would not occur with- out his agency. The regular course of nature is interfered with every time a savage chips a flint implement or builds a canoe, or by friction makes a fire. We cannot banish God from the universe without first stultifying ourselves and re- ducing man’s free will to the level of a mere mechanical force. But man is more than that; and this everyone knows. Furthermore, a great mistake is made when the dicta of specialists in scientific investigation are accepted in religious matters as of any particular value. Indeed, the concentration of specialists on narrow lines of investigation really unfits them for duly weighing religious evidence.
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