er it includes or not the
capacity of varying--which is just the question in point--is nowhere
specified. And I think it a most important rule in Scriptural exegesis,
to be most cautious as to limiting the meaning of any term which
Scripture itself has not limited, lest we find ourselves putting into the
teaching of Scripture our own human theories or prejudices. And
consider--Is not man a kind? And has not mankind varied, physically,
intellectually, spiritually? Is not the Bible, from beginning to end, a
history of the variations of mankind, for worse or for better, from their
original type? Let us rather look with calmness, and even with hope and
goodwill, on these new theories; for, correct or incorrect, they surely
mark a tendency towards a more, not a less, Scriptural view of Nature.
Are they not attempts, whether successful or unsuccessful, to escape from
that shallow mechanical notion of the universe and its Creator which was
too much in vogue in the eighteenth century among divines as well as
philosophers; the theory which Goethe, to do him justice--and after him
Mr Thomas Carlyle--have treated with such noble scorn; the theory, I
mean, that God has wound up the universe like a clock, and left it to
tick by itself till it runs down, never troubling Himself with it; save
possibly--for even that was only half believed--by rare miraculous
interferences with the laws which He Himself had made? Out of that
chilling dream of a dead universe ungoverned by an absent God, the human
mind, in Germany especially, tried during the early part of this century
to escape by strange roads; roads by which there was no escape, because
they were not laid down on the firm ground of scientific facts. Then, in
despair, men turned to the facts which they had neglected; and said--We
are weary of philosophy: we will study you, and you alone. As for God,
who can find Him? And they have worked at the facts like gallant and
honest men; and their work, like all good work, has produced, in the last
fifty years, results more enormous than they even dreamed. But what are
they finding, more and more, below their facts, below all phenomena which
the scalpel and the microscope can show? A something nameless,
invisible, imponderable, yet seemingly omnipresent and omnipotent,
retreating before them deeper and deeper, the deeper they delve: namely,
the life which shapes and makes; that which the old schoolmen called
"forma formativa," which t