Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/209

Rh could prove the contrary, men must be supposed to have developed out of monkeys by the forces now at work, the imagination would outrun the reason. It would be assumed that a religion was the growth of that stage of development at which the human intellect had arrived, and not the work of a series of sudden interferences. Christianity would be a phenomenon to be studied like others by the investigation of the conditions under which it arose, and the advocates of a theory of supernatural intervention would have to encounter a set of established beliefs instead of finding them in their favor. This is the imperceptible intellectual influence which gradually permeates and transforms the prevalent conceptions by a process which is as irresistible as it is difficult to define by accurate formula?. Religious instincts, we rightly say, are indestructible; but the forms in which they may be embodied are indefinitely variable, and no one can say how fast and how far the influence of a change worked in one department of thought may gradually spread by a silent contagion to others apparently removed from it.

Thus, admitting to the fullest extent that Darwinism not only does not threaten, but does not even tend to threaten, the really valuable elements of our religious opinions, it is quite consistent to maintain that it may change the conceptions in which they are at present embodied to an extent to which it is impossible to assign any limits. Darwinism, for example, does not make it more difficult to believe in a God. On the contrary, it may be fairly urged that any theory which tends to bring any sort of order out of the confused chaos of facts which we have before us, makes it so far more easy to maintain a rational theism such as is now possible. It helps us to form some dim guess of whence we are coming and of whither we are going—to see, as it were, an arc of the vast orbit in which the world is revolving, instead of being limited to an infinitesimal element, lost at each extremity in hopeless darkness. But it is true that it weakens that conception of the Creator which supposes him to intervene at stated periods, in order to give an impulse to the machinery. How deeply that change may affect all manner of theological conceptions it is unnecessary to consider. There is another doctrine which seems to be more nearly affected; and probably, though we seldom give open expression to our fears, it is this tendency which is really the animating cause of the alarm which is obviously felt. Does not the new theory make it difficult to believe in immortal souls? If we admit that the difference between men and monkeys is merely a difference of degree, can we continue to hold that monkeys will disappear at their death like a bubble, and that men will rise from their ashes? So vast a difference in the ultimate fate and the intrinsic nature of the two links should surely correspond to a wide gap in the chain. We are too proud to admit a gorilla or a chimpanzee to a future world, and yet, if they are only lower forms of humanity, we do not quite see our way to exclude them. The difficulty in one shape or another has long