all modern research:

The recoil of Christian apologetics towards the ground of religious
experience, a recoil produced by the pressure of scientific criticism
upon other supports of faith:

The restatement, or the recovery of ancient forms of statement, of the
doctrines of Creation and of divine Design in Nature, consequent upon
the discussion of evolution and of natural selection as its guiding
factor.

(1) The first of these is quite possibly the most important of all.
It was well defined in a notable paper read by Dr Gore, now Bishop of
Birmingham, to the Church Congress at Shrewsbury in 1896. We have learnt
a new caution both in ascribing and in denying significance to items of
evidence, in utterance or in event. There has been, as in art, a study
of values, which secures perspective and solidity in our representation
of facts. On the one hand, a given utterance or event cannot be drawn
into evidence as if all items were of equal consequence, like sovereigns
in a bag. The question whence and whither must be asked, and the
particular thing measured as part of a series. Thus measured it is not
less truly important, but it may be important in a lower degree. On the
other hand, and for exactly the same reason, nothing that is real is
unimportant. The "failures" are not mere mistakes. We see them, in St
Augustine's words, as "scholar's faults which men praise in hope of
fruit."

We cannot safely trace the origin of the evolutionistic method to the
influence of natural science. The view is tenable that theology led the
way. Probably this is a case of alternate and reciprocal debt. Quite
certainly the evolutionist method in theology, in Christian history,
and in the estimate of scripture, has received vast reinforcement
from biology, in which evolution has been the ever present and ever
victorious conception.

(2) The second effect named is the new willingness of Christian thinkers
to take definite account of religious experience. This is related to
Darwin through the general pressure upon religious faith of scientific
criticism. The great advance of our knowledge of organisms has been an
important element in the general advance of science. It has acted,
by the varied requirements of the theory of organisms, upon all other
branches of natural inquiry, and it held for a long time that leading
place in public attention which is now occupied by speculative physics.
Consequently it contributed largely to our present est