achieve its aim it could say nothing of the cause of this or indeed of
the most familiar occurrences. We should have become spectators or
convinced historians of an event which, in respect of its cause and
ultimate meaning, would be still impenetrable.

With regard to the origin of species, supposing life already
established, biological science has the well founded hopes and the
measure of success with which we are all familiar. All this has, it
would seem, little chance of collision with a consistent theism, a
doctrine which has its own difficulties unconnected with any
particular view of order or process. But when it was stated that
species had arisen by processes through which new species were still
being made, evolutionism came into collision with a statement,
traditionally religious, that species were formed and fixed once for
all and long ago.

What is the theological import of such a statement when it is regarded
as essential to belief in God? Simply that God's activity, with
respect to the formation of living creatures, ceased at some point in
past time.

"God rested" is made the touchstone of orthodoxy. And when, under the
pressure of the evidences, we found ourselves obliged to acknowledge
and assert the present and persistent power of God, in the maintenance
and in the continued formation of "types," what happened was the
abolition of a time-limit. We were forced only to a bolder claim, to
a theistic language less halting, more consistent, more thorough in
its own line, as well as better qualified to assimilate and modify
such schemes as Von Hartmann's philosophy of the Unconscious--a
philosophy, by the way, quite intolerant of a merely mechanical
evolution.[235]

Here was not the retrenchment of an extravagant assertion, but the
expansion of one which was faltering and inadequate. The traditional
statement did not need paring down so as to pass the meshes of a new
and exacting criticism. It was itself a net meant to surround and
enclose experience; and we must increase its size and close its mesh
to hold newly disclosed facts of life. The world, which had seemed a
fixed picture or model, gained first perspective and then solidity and
movement. We had a glimpse of organic _history_; and Christian thought
became more living and more assured as it met the larger view of life.

However unsatisfactory the new attitude might be to our critics, to
Christians the reform was positive. What was discarded was a