Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/248

 238 S. E. Baldivin than the brute inheritance which every man carries with him, and the process of evolution is an advance towards true salvation." The church is changing — has changed — its ground. It is not losing — has not lost — its power. It makes use of the old truth in a new wa}-. It was right at bottom. The unfolding of the law of evolution from the first, for those who accepted it, unquestionably tended to narrow the order of things in which man has his being. As the bond between him and the lowest forms of life became visibly stronger, that between him and any form of life higher than himself became visibly weaker. He was of less importance in the world. Wallace could open the gates to the new vision of the past ; he could not shut them. He could not lead men to any new standpoint from which they could look on the earth as the centre of the intellectual or moral universe. The church, at first, everywhere disinclined — still much of it disinclined — to accept the theory of evolution with all that it implies, has begun to readjust itself to its new environment. If, she says, this new evolution can produce from some single torpid cell a being with the intellectual and moral force of man, why may not man con- tain the torpid cell out of which in some at least may be evolving and ultimately, in some other stage of being, may be evolved what for want of a better word we call a Spirit — something with an energy akin to what we name divine? Force is persistent. That it is we know. What it is we do not know. If persistent in what is ma- terial, why not persistent in what is immaterial? If persistent in what we call time and space, why not persistent in something which we do not dare to call time or space and vaguely name eternity ? But questions like these do not much concern the mass of human- kind. The leaders of intellectual life are few. They are followed at a long interval. They know this, well. It is their office, in every generation, to set the goal, but to moderate rather than to speed the pace of the people as they turn in the new direction. The leaders of intellectual life who are in positions of ecclesi- astical authority, under the influence of these forces, have every- where begun to preach a new theology. It is a theology of the present. It might almost be called a theology of the earth, earthy. Its foundation is still the existence of a great first cause, which men call God. Its aim is still to set forth the whole duty of man, and to found it on his duty towards this almighty and eternal source of his being. But it sets it forth with less assumption of a knowledge ■of the unseen. No Nicene creed, no creed professing to define the genesis and nature and attributes of God, could ever be the product