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The Fundamentals Spiritual things are not to be discovered by material in- struments nor detected by the material senses. Physical science cannot penetrate to the origin of anything, but must content itself to deal with processes already begun. Profound mystery hangs over the birth of every human soul. Who can tell when it becomes a free personality, reflecting the image of its Creator ? Is the soul, as well as the body, begotten by the parent ? This question has divided theologians from the time of Augustine to the present day. The worst foes of Christianity are not physicists but meta- physicians. Hume is more dangerous than Darwin; the ag- nosticism of Hamilton and Mansel is harder to meet than that of Tyndall and Huxley; the fatalism of the philosophers is more to be dreaded than the materialism of any scientific men. The sophistries of the Socratic philosophy touching the freedom of the will are more subtile than those of the Spen- cerian school. Christianity, being a religion of fact and his- tory, is a free-born son in the family of the inductive sciences, and is not specially hampered by the paradoxes inevitably con- nected with all attempts to give expression to ultimate con- ceptions of truth. The field is now as free as it has ever been to those who are content to act upon such positive evidence of the truth of Christianity as the Creator has been pleased to afford them. The evidence for evolution, even in its milder form, does not begin to be as strong as that for the revelation of God in the Bible.
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