y, therefore, at this point
to advert to the various influences which have contributed to form the
mind of our time, and to give it its instinctive bias in one direction
or another. Powerful and legitimate as these influences have been,
they have nevertheless been in various ways partial, and because of
their very partiality they have, when they absorbed the mind, as new
modes of thought are apt to do, prejudiced it against the consideration
of other, possibly of deeper and more far-reaching, truths.

First, there is the enormous development of physical science. This has
engrossed human intelligence in our own times to an extent which can
hardly be over-estimated. Far more mind has been employed in
constructing the great fabric of knowledge, which we call science, than
in any other pursuit of men. Far more mind has had its characteristic
qualities and temper imparted to it by scientific study than by study
in any other field. It is of science--which to all intents and
purposes means physical science--of science and its methods and results
that the modern mind is most confident, and speaks with the most
natural and legitimate pride. Now science, even in this restricted
sense, covers a great range of subjects; it may be physics in the
narrowest meaning of the word, or chemistry, or biological science.
The characteristic of our own age has been the development of the last,
and in particular its extension to man. It is impossible to dispute
the legitimacy of this extension. Man has his place in nature; the
phenomena of life have one of their signal illustrations in him, and he
is as proper a subject of biological study as any other living being.
But the intense preoccupation of much of the most vigorous intelligence
of our time with the biological study of man is not without effects
upon the mind itself, which we need to consider. It tends to produce a
habit of mind to which certain assumptions are natural and inevitable,
certain other assumptions incredible from the first. This habit of
mind is in some ways favourable to the acceptance of the Atonement.
For example, the biologist's invincible conviction of the unity of
life, and of the certainty and power with which whatever touches it at
one point touches it through and through, is in one way entirely
favourable. Many of the most telling popular objections to the idea of
Atonement rest on an atomic conception of personality--a conception
according to which ever