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[234]--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 of evolution seemed to fall with crushing force.

With regard to Man I leave out, acknowledging a grave omission, the
doctrine of the Fall and of Sin. And I do so because these have not
yet, as I believe, been adequately treated: here the fruitful reaction
to the stimulus of evolution is yet to come. The doctrine of sin,
indeed, falls principally within the scope of that discussion which
has followed or displaced the Darwinian; and without it the Fall
cannot be usefully considered. For the question about the Fall is a
question not merely of origins, but of the interpretation of moral
facts whose moral reality must first be established.

I confine myself therefore to Creation and the dignity of man.

The meaning of evolution, in the most general terms, is that the
differentiation of forms is not essentially separate from their
behaviour and use; that if these are within the scope of study, that
is also; that the world has taken the form we see by movements not
unlike those we now see in progress; that what may be called proximate
origins are continuous in the way of force and matter, continuous in
the way of life, with actual occurrences and actual characteristics.
All this has no revolutionary bearing upon the question of ultimate
origins. The whole is a statement about process. It says nothing to
metaphysicians about cause. It simply brings within the scope of
observation or conjecture that series of changes which has given their
special characters to the different parts of the world we see. In
particular, evolutionary science aspires to the discovery of the
process or order of the appearance of life itself: if it were to