be asked whether a complete
and consistent theory of Evolution does not really demand such a
conception? Why should Evolution stop with the Organic? It is surely
obvious that the complement of Evolution is Advolution, and the inquiry,
Whence has all this system of things come, is, after all, of minor
importance compared with the question, Whither does all this tend?
Science, as such, may have little to say on such a question. And it is
perhaps impossible, with such faculties as we now possess, to imagine an
Evolution with a future as great as its past. So stupendous is the
development from the atom to the man that no point can be fixed in the
future as distant from what man is now as he is from the atom. But it
has been given to Christianity to disclose the lines of a further
Evolution. And if Science also professes to offer a further Evolution,
not the most sanguine evolutionist will venture to contrast it, either
as regards the dignity of its methods, the magnificence of its aims, or
the certainty of its hopes, with the prospects of the Spiritual Kingdom.
That Science has a prospect of some sort to hold out to man, is not
denied. But its limits are already marked. Mr. Herbert Spencer, after
investigating its possibilities fully, tells us, "Evolution has an
impassable limit."[99] It is the distinct claim of the Third Kingdom
that this limit is not final. Christianity opens a way to a further
development--a development apart from which the magnificent past of
Nature has been in vain, and without which Organic Evolution, in spite
of the elaborateness of its processes and the vastness of its
achievements, is simply a stupendous _cul de sac_. Far as nature carries
on the task, vast as is the distance between the atom and the man, she
has to lay down her tools when the work is just begun. Man, her most
rich and finished product, marvelous in his complexity, all but Divine
in sensibility, is to the Third Kingdom not even a shapeless embryo. The
old chain of processes must begin again on the higher plane if there is
to be a further Evolution. The highest organism of the Second
Kingdom--simple, immobile, dead as the inorganic crystal, toward the
sphere above--must be vitalized afresh. Then from a mass of all but
homogeneous "protoplasm" the organism must pass through all the stages
of differentiation and integration, growing in perfectness and beauty
under the unfolding of the higher Evolution, until it reaches the
Infinite Com