nsiderate to believe that anything may in
time become anything else.

It is true that this exaggeration of the belief in uniformity has
produced in turn its own perilous reaction. From refusing to believe
whatever can be called exceptional, some have come to believe whatever
can be called wonderful.

But, on the whole, the discontinuous or highly various character of
experience received for many years too little deliberate attention. The
conception of uniformity which is a necessity of scientific description
has been taken for the substance of history. We have accepted a
postulate of scientific method as if it were a conclusion of scientific
demonstration. In the name of a generalisation which, however just on
the lines of a particular method, is the prize of a difficult exploit of
reflexion, we have discarded the direct impressions of experience;
or, perhaps it is more true to say, we have used for the criticism of
alleged experiences a doctrine of uniformity which is only valid in the
region of abstract science. For every science depends for its advance
upon limitation of attention, upon the selection out of the whole
content of consciousness of that part or aspect which is measurable by
the method of the science. Accordingly there is a science of life which
rightly displays the unity underlying all its manifestations. But there
is another view of life, equally valid, and practically sometimes more
important, which recognises the immediate and lasting effect of
crisis, difference, and revolution. Our ardour for the demonstration
of uniformity of process and of minute continuous change needs to be
balanced by a recognition of the catastrophic element in experience, and
also by a recognition of the exceptional significance for us of events
which may be perfectly regular from an impersonal point of view.

An exorbitant jealousy of miracle, revelation, and ultimate moral
distinctions has been imported from evolutionary science into religious
thought. And it has been a damaging influence, because it has taken
men's attention from facts, and fixed them upon theories.

II.

With this acknowledgment of important drawbacks, requiring many words
for their proper description, I proceed to indicate certain results
of Darwin's doctrine which I believe to be in the long run wholly
beneficial to Christian thought. These are:

The encouragement in theology of that evolutionary method of observation
and study, which has shaped