e standpoint of faith also has
its logical and justified science, and that it is able to appreciate the
{373} world of the real more universally and candidly, and offers to
logical reasoning fewer and less important difficulties, than the systems
of atheism.

We have now discussed all the essential and direct points of contacts
between Christianity and the theory of evolution. But a remaining part,
still more closely related to the centre of the Christian view of the
world, yet offers some indirect points of contact which demand treatment.

Sec. 5. _The Redeemer and the Redemption. The Kingdom of God and the
Acceptance of Salvation._

As soon as it is once an established fact that an evolution theory of the
origin of man as a merely scientific theory permits all the valuable
qualities of man, when they have once come into existence, to show
themselves undiminished in their entire greatness and importance, and must
so permit them, then the whole Christian view of the world, of the
Redeemer, his person, his course of redemption, and his work, remains
entirely untouched by all these scientific theories of evolution. Yet the
Biblical representation, the orthodox perception, and the actual history of
the Redeemer and his work, present us with some evidences which are rather
in sympathy than in antipathy with these scientific theories. First, the
long preparation for his birth, which began immediately after the fall of
man and stretched over at least four thousand years, perhaps over a much
longer period, the special preparation of his human genealogy, the
selection, separation, and guidance of the ancestor and of the people of
Israel, of the tribe, the family, and finally of the mother of Jesus--all
these are manifestly {374} just as favorable to the idea of evolution as
they would have been to the idea of a sudden creation of man out of
nothing, if Christ, the second Adam, had come into existence by a sudden
creation. Moreover, the Redeemer himself was wholly subject to the ordinary
laws of development of the human individual, and was, from his annunciation
and conception, developed entirely like man in the long process of
evolution from the egg and its still absolutely indifferent spiritual worth
through all the imperceptible stages of development before and after the
birth up to the full age of man. Likewise the result of his course of
salvation, redemption, and entrance into the kingdom of God, underwent the
same proce