eaning of any term which Scripture itself has
not limited, lest we find ourselves putting into the teaching of
Scripture our own human theories or prejudices. And consider, Is
not man a kind? And has not mankind varied, physically,
intellectually, spiritually? Is not the Bible, from beginning to
end, a history of the variations of mankind, for worse or for
better, from their original type?

Let us rather look with calmness, and even with hope and good will,
on these new theories; for, correct or incorrect, they surely mark a
tendency toward a more, not a less, scriptural view of nature. Are
they not attempts, whether successful or unsuccessful, to escape
from that shallow mechanical notion of the universe and its Creator
which was too much in vogue in the eighteenth century among divines
as well as philosophers; the theory which Goethe (to do him
justice), and after him Mr. Thomas Carlyle, have treated with such
noble scorn; the theory, I mean, that God has wound up the universe
like a clock, and left it to tick by itself till it runs down, never
troubling Himself with it, save possibly--for even that was only
half believed--by rare miraculous interferences with the laws which
He Himself had made? Out of that chilling dream of a dead universe
ungoverned by an absent God, the human mind, in Germany especially,
tried during the early part of this century to escape by strange
roads; roads by which there was no escape, because they were not
laid down on the firm ground of scientific facts. Then, in despair,
men turned to the facts which they had neglected, and said: We are
weary of philosophy; we will study you, and you alone. As for God,
who can find Him? And they have worked at the facts like gallant
and honest men; and their work, like all good work, has produced, in
the last fifty years, results more enormous than they even dreamed.
But what are they finding, more and more, below their facts, below
all phenomena which the scalpel and the microscope can show? A
something nameless, invisible, imponderable, yet seemingly
omnipresent and omnipotent, retreating before them deeper and
deeper, the deeper they delve: namely, the life which shapes and
makes--that which the old school-men called "forma formativa," which
they call vital force and what not--metaphors all, or rather
counters to mark an unknown quantity, as if they should call it x or
y. One says: It is all vibrations; but his reason, unsatisfied,
asks