various wonder of the
world which in devout minds is food for devotion.

It was in the eighteenth century that the harder statement took shape.
Something in the preciseness of that age, its exaltation of law, its
cold passion for a stable and measured universe, its cold denial, its
cold affirmation of the power of God, a God of ice, is the occasion of
that rigidity of religious thought about the living world which Darwin
by accident challenged, or rather by one of those movements of genius
which, Goethe ("No productiveness of the highest kind... is in the power
of anyone."--"Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret". London,
1850.) declares, are "elevated above all earthly control."

If religious thought in the eighteenth century was aimed at a fixed and
nearly finite world of spirit, it followed in all these respects the
secular and critical lead. ("La philosophie reformatrice du XVIIIe
siecle" (Berthelot, "Evolutionisme et Platonisme", Paris, 1908, page
45.) ramenait la nature et la societe a des mecanismes que la pensee
reflechie peut concevoir et recomposer." In fact, religion in a
mechanical age is condemned if it takes any but a mechanical tone.
Butler's thought was too moving, too vital, too evolutionary, for the
sceptics of his time. In a rationalist, encyclopaedic period, religion
also must give hard outline to its facts, it must be able to display
its secret to any sensible man in the language used by all sensible men.
Milton's prophetic genius furnished the eighteenth century, out of the
depth of the passionate age before it, with the theological tone it was
to need. In spite of the austere magnificence of his devotion, he gives
to smaller souls a dangerous lead. The rigidity of Scripture exegesis
belonged to this stately but imperfectly sensitive mode of thought. It
passed away with the influence of the older rationalists whose precise
denials matched the precise and limited affirmations of the static
orthodoxy.

I shall, then, leave the specially biblical aspect of the
debate--interesting as it is and even useful, as in Huxley's
correspondence with the Duke of Argyll and others in 1892 ("Times",
1892, passim.)--in order to consider without complication the permanent
elements of Christian thought brought into question by the teaching of
evolution.

Such permanent elements are the doctrine of God as Creator of the
universe, and the doctrine of man as spiritual and unique. Upon both the
doctrine o