Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/599

Rh. Does he, then, believe in the theory of special creation? Was there no "becoming" for the forms we see? Were they suddenly flashed into existence by the Divine fiat, or did they struggle out of the ground like Milton's horse? There is little gained, from the strictly orthodox point of view, in holding aloof from Darwin's conclusion, on the simple ground of the insufficiency of the evidence, if you hold yourself prepared to accept it as soon as a little more evidence is tendered. If the theologian descends into the arena, it should be, not to declare that the Darwinian hypothesis is as yet unproved—a simple man of science, if he thought the facts warranted it, might do that—but to declare it, on a priori grounds, unprovable because false. When Theology can take this tone and make it good, she will be listened to; but, when theologians merely potter in science, there is really no special significance in their acceptance of this or their rejection of that scrap of scientific doctrine; what their opinion, one way or another, is worth, simply depends on the degree of their competency in relation to the matter under discussion. This is a point that should not be lost sight of; for a certain illusion is apt to be created when a professed theologian enters the scientific arena. He is popularly supposed to carry with him certain higher canons of criticism, to represent some authority that can traverse the decisions of science and hold them in check. It is important, therefore, to watch him and see what he does; and if we observe that he is merely making what use he can of his knowledge of the scientific elements of the case, and carefully keeping his theological commission in his pocket, we should attach no more importance to his intervention than if some scientific student or literary man of about equal knowledge of the subject had come forward to have his say.

In favor of Darwinism there is this to be said, that it deals with veræ causæ. It points to certain natural laws or conditions that visibly tend toward the variation of species, and it furnishes, in certain cases, almost conclusive evidence of the descent of different types from a common ancestral form. What, it may be asked, has theology done to render the world of organic forms intelligible to us? All the talk we now hear about a plan of creation and divine ideals is simply an attempt to give a theological complexion to facts that science has discovered, and that are found to be incongruous with the rude conception of creation hitherto current. In company with Darwin and Spencer we feel that we are at least on the road to sound and exact knowledge of the processes of development, to an understanding of how what is came to be as it is. In company with the theologian we quickly realize the hollow and formal character of the explanations he tenders. Except when he openly borrows the language and theories of science, he has absolutely nothing to tell us that our intellectual faculties can appropriate. If theology had a theory of the universe capable of entering into serious competition with the theory of evolution, then no doubt