f evolution seemed to fall with crushing force.

With regard to Man I leave out, acknowledging a grave omission, the
doctrine of the Fall and of Sin. And I do so because these have not yet,
as I believe, been adequately treated: here the fruitful reaction to the
stimulus of evolution is yet to come. The doctrine of sin, indeed, falls
principally within the scope of that discussion which has followed or
displaced the Darwinian; and without it the Fall cannot be usefully
considered. For the question about the Fall is a question not merely of
origins, but of the interpretation of moral facts whose moral reality
must first be established.

I confine myself therefore to Creation and the dignity of man.

The meaning of evolution, in the most general terms, is that the
differentiation of forms is not essentially separate from their
behaviour and use; that if these are within the scope of study, that is
also; that the world has taken the form we see by movements not unlike
those we now see in progress; that what may be called proximate origins
are continuous in the way of force and matter, continuous in the way of
life, with actual occurrences and actual characteristics. All this has
no revolutionary bearing upon the question of ultimate origins. The
whole is a statement about process. It says nothing to metaphysicians
about cause. It simply brings within the scope of observation or
conjecture that series of changes which has given their special
characters to the different parts of the world we see. In particular,
evolutionary science aspires to the discovery of the process or order
of the appearance of life itself: if it were to achieve its aim it
could say nothing of the cause of this or indeed of the most familiar
occurrences. We should have become spectators or convinced historians of
an event which, in respect of its cause and ultimate meaning, would be
still impenetrable.

With regard to the origin of species, supposing life already
established, biological science has the well founded hopes and the
measure of success with which we are all familiar. All this has, it
would seem, little chance of collision with a consistent theism, a
doctrine which has its own difficulties unconnected with any particular
view of order or process. But when it was stated that species had
arisen by processes through which new species were still being made,
evolutionism came into collision with a statement, traditionally
religious, that spec