Page:The Theory of Evolution as an Aid to Faith and God.pdf/4

4 brain thus would be the phenomenal sign to us of God's life in interaction with our own, and this intimate living relationship suggests how he could cooperate with or dampen the ardor of our desires and urge us to heightened activity, and how it is that, "The light which now shineth, which giveth us light, is through him who enlighteneth our eyes, which is the same light that quickeneth our understandings."

From time to time and in accordance with law and moral purpose, God could attend consciously to our needs and prayers and the "sudden strokes of ideas" awakened within us at such times would make the presence of the Spirit seem like that of a visitor when He is so near us always. By individual inspiration and by sending choice spirits among men from time to time, God is no doubt always active to further the life of men. But through Jesus of Nazareth he revealed the fullest life. Of this we may be sure, as Jesus himself taught, through the fact that God cooperated with him in his mighty deeds of love, often modifying his habitual ways of acting in nature and performing miracles to aid him in the training of his disciples through a long and agonizing process of disillusionment, in which they surrendered all desires that were in the way of absolute love of him. And finally when Jesus had performed the agonizing task of Messiah and had died to reveal the kindly life of God, the Divine Spirit witnessed that Jesus' claim to reveal the most abundant life was true, by restoring in his case his accustomed activities to his life, thus allowing him to again appear in the accustomed form among his disciples. For our sakes, in order to turn us to Himself-through Christ, he brought about the resurrection of our Lord.

God thus shows himself as interested in our achievement of fuller life with its accompanying happiness. As we understand and love Christ, the whole world becomes transformed and full of new and religious value, and when the power to know this world is achieved by us, we can adequately adjust our thoughts and acts to our true environment; and behold, our Father stands revealed all about us, not only in the grandeur of the lilies of the field, but in sunshine and in the storm, in life and in death; and often he seems present most potently when we meet evils. Christ desired us to see the Father thus; and that he himself stands at the door and knocks, willing to come in and sup with us and we with him, eager to live with us in the greatest intimacy.

We have tried to show how the theory of evolution helps us to realize the possibility of this intimate relation to God and Christ always; that inhere is no self-running nature, but' that God is immanent in the world; and this view renders sanity,—more adequate adjustment to our true environment, far more easy than when we thought of him as absent.

Finally, this theory removes obstacles in the way of so many to belief in the resurrection. Such a God, who through millions of years has striven to make such lives as we now enjoy possible, could not allow us to go out in a night This thought is nobly expressed by the great geologist, Prof Le Conte: "Mature is the womb in which, and evolution the process by which, are generated sons of God. Now,—do you not see?—without immortality, this whole purpose is balked—the whole process of cosmic evolution is futile. Shall God 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?" Reflections like these make it very difficult for a good man to think so unworthily of God as to doubt his willingness to contribute to our continued existence. And the theory of evolution, from our point of view, enabling us to see in the body of man the phenomenal sign of God's purposive activity, makes the resurrection of the body mean simply the renewal of God's accustomed activities in cooperation with our own. To live again and know ourselves and our friends it seems that our bodies must be restored to us; for, to quote Prof. Taylor: "Unless the 'soul' continues to live for aims and interests teleologically continues with those of its earthly life, there would be no genuine extension of our self-hood beyond the grave. And in order that a man may continue to have his interests, he must have his body, which, in the words of Prof. Taylor, stands on his system of habitual reactions, and so is indispensable to his existence as a self, restored to him, and this restoration after death could only be, in our view, in case God restored his wonted activities in a resurrection of his body.

Prof. Howison also looks confidently for the resurrection of the body. In his Limits of Evolution he writes on this subject as follows: "As ourselves the causal sources of the perceived world and its cosmic order . . . . we are to go perceptively onward, exercising forever our inherent power of framing experience, of begetting worlds of sense-colored variety and definiteness, in their long career surely of higher and higher subtilty, refinement, beauty, and goodness." Here Prof. Howison is emphasizing the part that man's activities in connection with his body will play in a future stage of existence. The part that God's activity will play is emphasized by Paul in a way we can now see more clearly in the light of the above discussion. In his letter to the Romans, he says: “But if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his spirit that dwelleth in you.” There is nothing then that science contends for in the way of an obstacle to belief in the resurrection of the body; and, through the above discussion, we are helped to believe in future stages of activity in which we may "partake of the fruit of the vine" with the Lord Jesus and with the great and good of every age, and in the society of all those loved ones who have made life so sweet here and who have passed or shall pass to their glory in those happy worlds; and there we may hope to stand in the presence of the Ancient of Days, the Adamic Being who, perhaps, as we have suggested above, headed the race of man, and who, through his devotion to immortal spirits, his children, won the resurrection of the body and, with our heavenly mother, presides in the celestial world from whence he secures with Christ the cooperation of the Holy Spirit, who is in and through all things to the end that we might win the fullest lives here and companionship with Him in the eternal world hereafter.

In conclusion, then, let us repeat, that if a Divine purpose is immanent in nature, nature's forms must be thought of as evolving in a way parallel to the unfolding of the divine purpose. The use of the theory is a most important means of advancing to a realization of God's immanence in nature and life, and a great remover of intellectual difficulties that hamper faith in so many. And finally the theory awakens within us from the above point of view. An expectation of the resurrection, or the renewal of God's reactions to our lives, the restoration of the spirit to the body, without which there can be little or no life or happiness. That God can do this seems certain and that he will do it is, at the very least, as certain as that the uniformity of nature that all science presupposes shall continue. Both the uniformities in nature and the resurrection depend upon the Father's love.