limitation, a negation. The movement was essentially conservative,
even actually reconstructive. For the language disused was a language
inconsistent with the definitions of orthodoxy; it set bounds to the
infinite, and by implication withdrew from the creative rule all such
processes as could be brought within the descriptions of research. It
ascribed fixity and finality to that "creature" in which an apostle
taught us to recognise the birth-struggles of an unexhausted progress.
It tended to banish mystery from the world we see, and to confine it
to a remote first age.

In the reformed, the restored, language of religion, Creation became
again not a link in a rational series to complete a circle of the
sciences, but the mysterious and permanent relation between the
infinite and the finite, between the moving changes we know in part,
and the Power, after the fashion of that observation, unknown, which
is itself "unmoved all motion's source."[236]

With regard to man it is hardly necessary, even were it possible, to
illustrate the application of this bolder faith. When the record of
his high extraction fell under dispute, we were driven to a
contemplation of the whole of his life, rather than of a part and that
part out of sight. We remembered again, out of Aristotle, that the
result of a process interprets its beginnings. We were obliged to read
the title of such dignity as we may claim, in results and still more
in aspirations.

Some men still measure the value of great present facts in
life--reason and virtue and sacrifice--by what a self-disparaged
reason can collect of the meaner rudiments of these noble gifts. Mr.
Balfour has admirably displayed the discrepancy, in this view, between
the alleged origin and the alleged authority of reason. Such an
argument ought to be used not to discredit the confident reason, but
to illuminate and dignify its dark beginnings, and to show that at
every step in the long course of growth a Power was at work which is
not included in any term or in all the terms of the series.

I submit that the more men know of actual Christian teaching, its
fidelity to the past, and its sincerity in face of discovery, the more
certainly they will judge that the stimulus of the doctrine of
evolution has produced in the long run vigour as well as flexibility
in the doctrine of Creation and of man.

I pass from Evolution in general to Natural Selection.

The character in religious language whic