hemistry has grown out of alchemy, and astronomy out
of astrology, this does not empty them of present truth or impair at all
their authority and trustworthiness to-day. Though man's mind has grown
out of the sensations of brutish ancestors, that does not take away the
fact that he has now risen to a height from which he overlooks all these
mists and sees the light which never was on sea or land. The real
beginning of a statue is not in the rough outline in which it first
appears, but in the creative idea of the perfect work which regulates
its whole progress. The real nature of a tree is not to be discovered in
the first swellings of the acorn, or the first out-pushing of its
rootlets, but rather are acorn and rootlet themselves parts of that
generic idea, that _evolutive potentiality_, which is only to be
understood when manifested in its completer form in the full-grown
monarch of the forest. So to discern the real character and motor-power
of the world's evolution, we must look, not to its beginnings, but to
its end, and see in the latest stages, and its highest moral and
spiritual forms and forces, not disguises of its earlier stages, but
ampler manifestations of that Divine power and purpose which is the
ever-active agent, working through all the varied levels of creation.

The evolution theory is, also, it must be acknowledged, hostile to that
phase of theology which conceives of God as a being outside of nature;
which regarded the universe as a dead lump, a mechanical fabric where
the Creator once worked, at the immensely remote dawn of creation; and
to which again, for a few short moments, this transcendental Power
stooped from His celestial throne, when the successive species of living
beings were called into being in brief exertions of supernatural energy.
But this mechanical view of God who, as Goethe said, "only from without
should drive and twirl the universe about," what a poor conception of
God, after all, was that; not undeserving the ridicule of the great
German.

Certainly, the idea of God which Wordsworth has given us, as a Power not
indefinitely remote, but ever present and infinitely near,

"A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,
And rolls through all things,"

is a much more inspiring and venerable thought. This is the conception
of God that Paul has given us, "the God in whom we live and move and
have our being;" this is the conception that