ity looks askance on it. And even in progressive America,
one of the largest and most liberal of American denominations has
recently formally tried and condemned one of its clergy for heresy, for
the publication of a book in which the principles of Evolution are
frankly adopted and applied to Christianity. For a man to call himself a
Christian Evolutionist is (we have been told by high Orthodox authority)
a contradiction in terms.

I think it is safe to say to-day that Evolution has come to stay. It is
too late to turn it out of the mansions of modern thought. And it is,
therefore, a vital question, "Can belief in God, and the soul, and
divine revelation abide under the same roof with evolution in peace? Or
must Christianity vacate the realm of modern thought and leave it to the
chilling frosts of materialism and scepticism?"

Now, if I have been able to understand the issue and its grounds, there
is no such alternative, no such incompatibility between Evolution and
Christianity.

There is, I know, a form of Evolution and a form of Christianity, which
are mutually contradictory.

There is a form of Evolution which is narrowly materialistic. It
dogmatically asserts that there is nothing in existence but matter and
physical forces, and the iron laws according to which they develop.
Life, according to this school, is only a product of the happy
combination of the atoms; feeling and thought are but the iridescence of
the brain tissues; conscience but a transmuted form of ancestral fears
and expediences. Soul, revelation, providence, nothing but illusions of
the childish fancy of humanity's infancy. Opposed to it, fighting with
all the intensity of those who fight for their very life, stands a
school of Christians who maintain that unless the special creation of
species by divine fiat and the frequent intervention of God and His
angels in the world be admitted, religion has received its death wound.
According to this school, unless the world was created in six days, and
Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and it obeyed, and Hezekiah
turned the solar shadow back on the dial, and Jesus was born without
human father, and unless some new miracle will interfere with the
regular course of law, of rain and dew, of sickness and health, of cause
and effect, whenever a believer lifts up his voice in prayer, why then,
the very foundations of religion are destroyed.

Now, of course, between a Christianity and an Evolutionism of