l the while to new
stimuli, and the title of a recent book, _Creative Evolution_, indicates
a changed scientific and philosophical attitude towards the world.

From this scientific movement we shall find in our present Christian
convictions, with much else, these items:

(1) The conception of the unity of all life. When Goethe in a flash of
insight saw the structure of the entire tree in a single leaf, and of
the complete skeleton of the animal in the skull of a sheep, he gave the
mind of man a new assurance of the unity that pervades the whole
creation. And when scientific men asserted the universality of law, they
made it forever impossible for us to divide life into separate
districts--the secular and the sacred, the natural and the
supernatural. Principles discovered in man's spirit in its responses to
truth, to love, to companionship, to justice, hold good of his response
to God. There is a "law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus"; and it
must be ascertained and worked with. But "laws" are recognized as our
labels for the discoveries we have made of God's usual methods of
working, and they do not stand between us and Him, barring our personal
fellowship with Him in prayer, nor between Him and His world, excluding
His new and completer entrances into the world's life.

(2) The thought of development or evolution as the process by which
religious ideas and institutions, like all other forms of life, live and
grow in a changing world.

(3) The abandonment of the attempt to prove God's existence and
attributes from what can be seen in His world. We cannot expect to find
in the conclusion more than the premises contain, and "nature" as it now
is can never yield a personal and moral, much less a Christian, God.

And not from nature up to nature's God,
But down from nature's God look nature through.

(4) A readjustment of our view of the Bible, which frankly recognizes
that its scientific ideas are those of the ages in which its various
writers lived, and cannot be authoritative for us today.

(5) A larger view of God, commensurate with the older, bigger, more
complex and more orderly world the physical sciences have brought to
light.

A fourth source of materials, which is but another vein of this
scientific quarry, is _the historical and literary investigation of the
Bible_. This has not been so recently opened as is commonly supposed,
but has been worked at intervals throughout the history of the Church