l be
interesting here to call a witness or so to the extreme instability of
absolute negation.

Here, for example, is a deliverance from Professor Metchnikoff, who was
a very typical antagonist of all religion. He died only the other day.
He was a very great physiologist indeed; he was a man almost of the rank
and quality of Pasteur or Charles Darwin. A decade or more ago he wrote
a book called "The Nature of Man," in which he set out very plainly a
number of illuminating facts about life. They are facts so illuminating
that presently, in our discussion of sin, they will be referred to
again. But it is not Professor Metchnikoff's intention to provide
material for a religious discussion. He sets out his facts in order to
overthrow theology as he conceives it. The remarkable thing about his
book, the thing upon which I would now lay stress, is that he betrays no
inkling of the fact that he has no longer the right to conceive theology
as he conceives it. The development of his science has destroyed that
right.

He does not realise how profoundly modern biology has affected our ideas
of individuality and species, and how the import of theology is modified
through these changes. When he comes from his own world of modern
biology to religion and philosophy he goes back in time. He attacks
religion as he understood it when first he fell out with it fifty years
or more ago.

Let us state as compactly as possible the nature of these changes that
biological science has wrought almost imperceptibly in the general
scheme and method of our thinking.

The influence of biology upon thought in general consists essentially
in diminishing the importance of the individual and developing the
realisation of the species, as if it were a kind of super-individual, a
modifying and immortal super-individual, maintaining itself against the
outer universe by the birth and death of its constituent individuals.
Natural History, which began by putting individuals into species as if
the latter were mere classificatory divisions, has come to see that
the species has its adventures, its history and drama, far exceeding
in interest and importance the individual adventure. "The Origin of
Species" was for countless minds the discovery of a new romance in life.

The contrast of the individual life and this specific life may be
stated plainly and compactly as follows. A little while ago we current
individuals, we who are alive now, were each of us dist