Darwin and Modern Science [336]
far from it; certainly still much in need of the caution and courage by which past endurance prepares men for new emergencies. We have little enough reason to be sure that in the discussions awaiting us we shall do as well as our predecessors in theirs. Remembering their endurance of mental pain, their ardour in mental labour, the heroic temper and the high sincerity of controversialists on either side, we may well speak of our fathers in such words of modesty and self- judgment as Drayton used when he sang the victors of Agincourt. The progress of biblical study, in the departments of Introduction and Exegesis, resulting in the recovery of a point of view anciently tolerated if not prevalent, has altered some of the conditions of that discussion. In the years near 1858, the witness of Scripture was adduced both by Christian advocates and their critics as if unmistakeably irreconcilable with Evolution.
Huxley ("Science and Christian Tradition". London, 1904.) found the path of the blameless naturalist everywhere blocked by "Moses": the believer in revelation was generally held to be forced to a choice between revealed cosmogony and the scientific account of origins. It is not clear how far the change in Biblical interpretation is due to natural science, and how far to the vital movements of theological study which have been quite independent of the controversy about species. It belongs to a general renewal of Christian movement, the recovery of a heritage. "Special Creation"--really a biological rather than a theological conception,--seems in its rigid form to have been a recent element even in English biblical orthodoxy.
The Middle Ages had no suspicion that religious faith forbad inquiry into the natural origination of the different forms of life. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, an English Franciscan of the thirteenth century, was a mutationist in his way, as Aristotle, "the Philosopher" of the Christian Schoolmen, had been in his. So late as the seventeenth century, as we learn not only from early proceedings of the Royal Society, but from a writer so homely and so regularly pious as Walton, the variation of species and "spontaneous" generations had no theological bearing, except as instances of that various wonder of the world which in devout minds is food for devotion.
It was in the eighteenth century that the harder statement took shape. Something in the preciseness of that age, its exaltation of law, its cold passion for a stable and measured universe, its cold denial, its cold affirmation of the power of God, a God of ice, is the occasion of that rigidity of religious thought about the living world which Darwin by accident challenged, or rather by one of those movements of genius which, Goethe ("No productiveness of the highest kind...is in the power of anyone."--"Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret". London, 1850.) declares, are "elevated above all earthly control."
If religious thought in the eighteenth century was aimed at a fixed and nearly finite world of spirit, it followed in all these respects the secular and critical lead. ("La philosophie reformatrice du XVIIIe siecle (Berthelot, "Evolutionisme et Platonisme", Paris, 1908, page 45.) ramenait la nature et la societe a des mecanismes que la pensee reflechie peut concevoir et recomposer." In fact, religion in a mechanical age is condemned if it takes any but a mechanical tone. Butler's thought was too moving, too vital, too evolutionary, for the sceptics of his time. In a rationalist, encyclopaedic period, religion also must give hard outline to its facts, it must be able to display its secret to any sensible man in the language used by all sensible men. Milton's prophetic genius furnished the eighteenth century, out of the depth of the passionate age before it, with the theological tone it was to need. In spite of the 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
Huxley ("Science and Christian Tradition". London, 1904.) found the path of the blameless naturalist everywhere blocked by "Moses": the believer in revelation was generally held to be forced to a choice between revealed cosmogony and the scientific account of origins. It is not clear how far the change in Biblical interpretation is due to natural science, and how far to the vital movements of theological study which have been quite independent of the controversy about species. It belongs to a general renewal of Christian movement, the recovery of a heritage. "Special Creation"--really a biological rather than a theological conception,--seems in its rigid form to have been a recent element even in English biblical orthodoxy.
The Middle Ages had no suspicion that religious faith forbad inquiry into the natural origination of the different forms of life. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, an English Franciscan of the thirteenth century, was a mutationist in his way, as Aristotle, "the Philosopher" of the Christian Schoolmen, had been in his. So late as the seventeenth century, as we learn not only from early proceedings of the Royal Society, but from a writer so homely and so regularly pious as Walton, the variation of species and "spontaneous" generations had no theological bearing, except as instances of that various wonder of the world which in devout minds is food for devotion.
It was in the eighteenth century that the harder statement took shape. Something in the preciseness of that age, its exaltation of law, its cold passion for a stable and measured universe, its cold denial, its cold affirmation of the power of God, a God of ice, is the occasion of that rigidity of religious thought about the living world which Darwin by accident challenged, or rather by one of those movements of genius which, Goethe ("No productiveness of the highest kind...is in the power of anyone."--"Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret". London, 1850.) declares, are "elevated above all earthly control."
If religious thought in the eighteenth century was aimed at a fixed and nearly finite world of spirit, it followed in all these respects the secular and critical lead. ("La philosophie reformatrice du XVIIIe siecle (Berthelot, "Evolutionisme et Platonisme", Paris, 1908, page 45.) ramenait la nature et la societe a des mecanismes que la pensee reflechie peut concevoir et recomposer." In fact, religion in a mechanical age is condemned if it takes any but a mechanical tone. Butler's thought was too moving, too vital, too evolutionary, for the sceptics of his time. In a rationalist, encyclopaedic period, religion also must give hard outline to its facts, it must be able to display its secret to any sensible man in the language used by all sensible men. Milton's prophetic genius furnished the eighteenth century, out of the depth of the passionate age before it, with the theological tone it was to need. In spite of the 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