generation may as yet have failed to prove the fact. Future experiments may be as unavailing. But while the first instance of special creation is not only undiscovered but inconceivable, the suggestion comes with overwhelming force that the transition from inorganic matter to organic life as little needed the interposition of an extra-mundane God as the transition of our April into May and June. The objection to materialism could not be too strenuous, so long as matter was regarded as something which, without inherent mind, could build the cosmos and the thought and love and pity of mankind. Nay, let the separate atoms be as alive and pushing as you please; grant them not only chemical affinities, but each a brain compared with which Newton's or Plato's were an imbecile affair, and who shall deem that they could so put their heads together as to produce the present universe. "The divinity is in the atoms," as the seer hath told; but it is in them not as distinct in individualities, but as a pervasive and cohering unity.

I can easily imagine that more than one malicious humorist has said of this course of lectures upon Evolution, "As I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, To the Unknown God."" Not merely the worship of the unknown, but of the unknowable, is supposed by many persons to be the only worship that Evolutionism allows her votaries. It is a lamentable fact that Herbert Spencer is himself unknown to the majority save as the prophet of the Unknowable, a distinction as little to be envied as that accorded to Harriet Martineau, when it was said by some irreverent person, "There is no God, and Harriet Martineau is his prophet." For Spencer's doctrine of the Unknowable is the least characteristic and least valuable part of his entire performance. In his "First Principles" he has made it the propylæum to the temple of his thought, but its architecture is conceived in an entirely different spirit, and it only serves to keep us back from what is worthy of our admiration. It is as metaphysical as Prof. Davidson could wish, as metaphysical as Sir William Hamilton's "Philosophy of the Unconditioned" and Mansell's "Limits of Religious Thought," to which it immediately succeeded, inheriting the weakness of their philosophical method. With Hamilton and Mansell, he insisted on the unthinkable and consequently unknowable character of all the primary concepts of both Science and Religion. It is

astonishing how generally this aspect of Spencer's doctrine has been overlooked. It is an aspect that relieves it of all those dreadful consequences for which it has been held responsible. For however unknowable the ultimate concepts of science, we have Mr. Spencer's Biology and Psychology and Sociology to show us that we have no lack of scientific knowledge. If so much scientific knowledge in despite of fundamental ignorance, why not as much religious knowledge? There is nothing in the conditions of the problem which prevents this happy consummation. No one need be troubled by the assurance that an unrelated Absolute would be inapprehensible, that an unmanifested Infinite could never be found out, "in a universe full of visions and of voices." Starting from his doctrine of the Unknowable, Spencer proceeds to bring about the reconciliation of Science and Religion. They are reconciled by reciprocal confessions of an equal ignorance. Now I trust I shall not be thought presumptuous if I say that I cannot conceive a more senseless and ridiculous reconciliation than this. If I am thought presumptuous I can only say that I am so in the best of company that of as good a friend and loving an interpreter as Mr. Spencer ever had-Prof. E. L. Youmans, who wrote, "the terms of compromise he proposes are dishonorable to both parties, no less so to science than to theology." "Not what is most abstract but what is most concrete in each is the basis of the final and harmonious adjustment. ** Spencer, in the result he has reached, does more to help forward this adjustment than in the basis he proposes. When he gives us the demonstration of Science that all phenomena are the result of one absolute and omnipresent power, we see the first step in the process of reconciliation. Science will demonstrate the fundamental truths of religion, while the extravagance of theology will be corrected and its confusion made clear by the same process."

The doctrine of evolution is not Mr. Spencer's private property. He has not determined just what it shall or shall not be for all time. Other men had labored and he entered into their labors, and did more than any or than all who had preceded him. Others have entered into his labors and done great and glorious work. It is one of the most capable of these-Prof. Fiske—who writes, "The Doctrine of Evolution asserts, as the widest and deepest truth which the study of nature can disclose to us, that there exists a

Power to which no limit in time or space is conceivable, and that all the phenomena of the universe are, whether they be what we call material or what we call spiritual phenomena, manifestations of this Infinite and Eternal Power." Whatever fulness and richness of statement there is here that we seem to miss in Spencer's reconciliation of science and religion, there is nothing that has not come out in subsequent expansions of his thought. And surely there is no lack of knowledge here. We cannot know anything aright without knowing it of God. The old claim of theology to be Scientia Scientiarum, the science of the sciences, was never made so good before as it is now. And it is what we know that makes the vast Unknown the boundless continent of religious sentiment and aspiration. What makes the vast Unknown so quickening to our awe, our gladness and our trust is that what we do know is so wonderful, so marvelous, and we proceed to people all the great Unknown with the benignant forms and forces that have been openly revealed to us. When Charles Lainb was fifteen and Mary twenty-six, they saw the sea for the first time, and were not a little disappointed, because they expected to see "all the sea at once, the commensurate antagonist of the earth." But when we stand on the sea-shore, is it, as he said, only "a slip of salt-water" that we see? or only

"Eastward as far as the eye can see

Eastward, Eastward endlessly

The sparkle and tremor of purple sea"?

Surely what fills

It may be all we see, it is not all we feel. us with a joy so keen that it is almost pain is not alone the flashing tumult of the great expanse of waters; it is also that, beyond where sky and water meet, with the mind's eye we see the ocean reaching on and on, beautiful with the same unspeakable beauty that lies within our field of actual vision. It is the beauty of the known that makes the beauty of the Unknown so sure and so entrancing. And just as surely the soul's normal delight in the infinite God is not produced by any merely negative unknown. No more is it by any positive known. No, but by the warrantable conviction that all the infinite unknown is, equally with what we know, the haunt of beauty, order and majestic law.

Known as an infinite and eternal energy, I known as the

source of everything that is, known as he manifests himself in all things we can see or hear or apprehend in any way with sense or mind, the God of Evolution does not invite to wonder and to mystery alone. He does invite to these with a persuasion that grows every day more irresistible as the unknown is shot through and through with gleams from that great sun of knowledge which is mounting steadily our morning sky. But he invites no less to those attitudes and beatitudes of mind and heart which Mr. Frederic Harrison, that eloquent apostle of the Religion of Humanity, declares to be the best religion has to give"love, awe, sympathy, gratitude, consciousness of dependence, reverence for majesty, goodness, creative energy and life." The religion of Evolution is not, in the phrase of Mr. Harrison, "a religion only to stare at." It is a religion which sends us forth to work for higher truth and better service among men.

What word has it concerning immortality? The most encouraging that any system of philosophy or science has yet offered to the world. Much of the difficulty that Evolution is imagined to suggest was just as palpable before the time of Darwin and Spencer. If man has descended from the ape and the ascidian, were they also immortal? If not, when did immortality become the privilege of the individual? But there is no difficulty presented by the development of man from lower and the lowest forms, which is not presented equally by embryology. The embryological history of the individual resumes the development of the race. Beginning with a germ which cannot be distinguished from that of any animal or plant, he passes through fish-like and ape-like stages until he emerges a "radiating, jaculating fellow," monarch of all he surveys. At what stage of this development is the gift of immortality bestowed? The difficulty is every whit as great as that presented by the development of the species. There is no slightest proof of immortality; only a showing that the ascent of man from lower forms adds nothing, as it is very commonly supposed to do, to our embarassment. Meantime our embarassment is seriously lessened by our appreciation of the fact that in the course of cosmic development we have had the organic produced from the inorganic, and we have had the self-conscious produced from the unconscious. In either case we have, apparently, a greater leap

than from self-conscious life to immortality. We can only say that there was a time when favorable internal and external conditions struck out the spark of life; as further on they struck out the spark of self-consciousness. Again, no scientific doctrine not part and parcel of it has allied itself so firmly with the doctrine of Evolution as the doctrine of the conservation of energy. But if the conservation of energy be indeed a law, if it was all the way through the world of matter and of spirit, then somehow and somewhere the souls not only of the mighty ones of intellect and imagination but of humble folk whose names are soon forgotten upon earth are enabled to resume their conscious individual life. Again, one of the most significant and impressive aspects of the general scheme of Evolution is that of correllated growth. In the development of animal structures there goes along with the development of special organs, parts and functions, the development of certain others adapting them to changed conditions.

Now in the spiritual life of man there goes along with the development of all that is best in his intelligence, noblest in his affections, grandest and sweetest in his moral life, the development of the hope of an immortal life. Here is a correllated growth; and if the hope that is thus developed is not a valid hope, if it is not a solemn and majestic portent of a divine reality that we can trust with calm assurance, then have we a radical contradiction in our moral nature, increasing there with every higher thought and nobler act and purer purpose of our lives. If the almost invariable concomitant of the noblest living is this glorious hope, then, unless nature's house is radically divided against itself, this almost invariable concomitance suggests with overwhelming seriousness that the same Power which organizes in us the purest splendors of our thought and love, organizes in us the hope of an immortal life in which these splendors shall go shining on forever.

The formula of Evolution is the survival of the fittest. I know that by "the fittest" in this formula we are to understand merely the fittest, i. e. the ablest, to survive. But if the significance of the doctrine of organic Evolution resolves itself into this identical proposition, it is a truism that was hardly worth the patience of Charles Darwin's toilsome years. Unless this doctrine can assure us in its widest scope of the survival of the ideally fittest, the fittest to carry