000 years
since creation hardly showed on the dial upon which Geology recorded its
conclusions. There is no need to follow in detail how all this reacted
upon religion. The accepted religious scheme of things was an
intricately interlocking system irresistible in its logic as long as the
system remained unchallenged in its crucial points. If these should
begin to be doubted then the Christian appeal would have lost, for the
time at least, a most considerable measure of its force. The inner peace
which we have already seen to be the keystone of the Protestant arch
grew in part out of the sense of a universal condemnation from which the
believer was happily saved; this in turn was conditioned by the
unquestioned acceptance of the Genesis narrative. We can see clearly
enough now that Christianity, and Protestant Christianity especially,
really depended upon something deeper than all this. Still for the time
being all these things were locked up together and once the accepted
foundations of theology began to be questioned far-reaching adjustments
were inevitable and the time of readjustment was bound to be marked by
great restlessness and confusion.

The evolutionary hypothesis profoundly affected man's thought about
himself. It challenged even more sharply his thought about God. Atheism,
materialism and agnosticism are an old, old trinity, but they had up to
our own time been at the mercy of more positive attitudes through their
inability to really answer those insurgent questions: Whence? Whither?
and Why? Creation had plainly enough demanded a creator. When Napoleon
stilled a group of debating officers in Egypt by pointing with a
Napoleonic gesture to the stars and saying, "Gentlemen, who made all
these?" his answer had been final. Paley's old-fashioned turnip-faced
watch with its analogies in the mechanism of creation had supplied an
irresistible argument for a creation according to design and a designing
creator. But now all this was changed. If Napoleon could have ridden
out from his august tomb, reassembled his officers from the dust of
their battlefields and resumed the old debate, the officers would have
been apparently in the position to answer--"Sire, they made themselves."
Our universe seemed to be sufficient unto itself.

We have reacted against all this and rediscovered God, if indeed we had
ever lost Him, but this ought not to blind those who have accomplished
the great transition to the confusion of faith w