Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/119

82 sioned force of the argument from analogy, fortified, as it can be in these later days, by the doctrine of evolution. As Dr. Le Conte has so eloquently and so forcibly shown, it does seem clear, through the long and agonising path of evolution, — through struggle, and death, and survival, — that a rational, a moral, a self-active being is on the way toward realised existence; and it is true that, unless there is immortality awaiting it, this long and hard advance through Nature will be balked, and the whole process of evolution turn futile. As surely as there is a God, — as surely as eternal Reason and Justice is really at the heart of things, — it is certain, on this showing, that there is everlasting continuance for the being, whatever it may be, that forms the goal toward which evolution is pressing. If in very deed and truth there is a God, then that he “shall be so long and at so great pains to achieve a spirit, capable of communing with him, and then allow it to lapse again into nothingness” is indeed incredible, — nay, it is impossible. And I doubt not that your undulled human hearts are so roused by the pathos-laden question with which Dr. Le Conte closed his reasonings — a question almost appalling in its outcry to Justice and to Pity — that it will require all your poise of philosophic will to bring yourselves back into the region of collected thought once more, and look the great problem of to-night steadily in the face again, with what Professor Royce has so fitly named “the calmer piety and gentleness of the serious reason.”

For, in sober truth, the central awe of all such faith-compelling questions and analogies is just this: