be true, it affects Christian teaching and institutions. It may be answered that with such a view of Christianity and of the Church as we are now presenting it is in almost entire accord. It might appear to be only another name for that process of the Divine Spirit which we have been describing. It is applicable universally; there is no particle of matter, and no moral phenomenon, with which it has not to do. It traces a single principle of life, working throughout the whole range of things known, and maintains that this existed potentially and in the germ in the original atoms of which the world is made1; so that the barriers fall away which seemed to separate organic from inorganic matter, or species from species, or animal from man, or, to carry the thought in its fullest result, ordinary men from Christ 2. There is nothing in this theory which would require a denial of the pre-eminence in the order of nature of the human mind and heart 3, nor which would prevent our recognising the absolute moral supremacy of our Lord in human nature1; nor, again, is it at all incompatible with the belief in a living God and the sense of His design or purpose in

1 See Note VII. An extract from Professor Tyndall's address at Belfast.

2 The boldest and most thorough appropriation of the doctrine of development by a Christian minister may be seen in 'A theologico-political Treatise' by the Rev. G. D'Oyly Snow (Trübner, 1874).

3 See Note VIII. A passage from Professor Huxley's work 'Man's place in Nature.'

* This moral supremacy is only another form for the assertion of our Lord's divinity. If the idea of the Divine immanence be maintained, then Christ stands at the summit of the whole development in which God manifests Himself. 'The image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in Him were all things created . . . all things have been created through Him and unto Him, and He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.' (Col. i. 15, 16. Rev. Version.)

the larger significance of these terms. The mechanical illustrations of design, such as that of the workman making a watch, are, no doubt, no longer valid to the Christian who accepts the doctrine of evolution; but his consciousness of unity, of harmony and of purpose in the development of the world and of mankind can hardly fail to be increased. Nor, lastly, is it repugnant to a sober assertion of freewill and independence, since even in the lowest forms of life it is individual origination and peculiarity on which depends the progress which it assumes1. which it assumes1. If this be so, then it corresponds in a remarkable manner with that doctrine which we have traced in Scripture and in human history, the doctrine of the Spirit and the Word, working upwards from the beginning towards the complete form of human development. The world is the manifestation of a power 2 which is present and active in every part of it, harmonizing it, educing from it life and morality; a power, the first traces of which may be seen far back in the origin of things, but which tends to the fullest expansion of moral and spiritual relations. If so, then man as man, whatever his aberrations may be, is the organ of this power, and all human institutions are built up by it, and tend to higher life, higher morality, under its incessant impulse.

1 See Note IX. Extracts from the writings of Darwin on the Relation of Evolution to Free Will,

2 The Agnostic philosophy, as represented by Mr. Herbert Spencer, (see his article on Religion, Past and Future, in the Nineteenth Century for January, 1884), fully recognises this power: but it maintains that, beyond the fact that it exists, we can have no knowledge of it. And yet, how can we be said to be without knowledge of a power, the working of which forms the subject of all our knowledge?

Further, the subordinate doctrines of the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest, are applicable to spiritual as well as to natural life and fitness; and if the Christian ideal be, as it has hitherto shown itself, the highest and the fittest, these doctrines would point to its eventual supremacy. They are applicable also to the social organizations of mankind; and, if the idea of a universal society, inspired by Christian love, be that to which historical experience points, these doctrines will help us to believe that such a universal society will eventually supersede those formed on any other social ideal, and grow to its full expansion.

Thus biological no less than Christian and historical research leads up to the hope of a redeemed humanity, a universal Church. The effort of human society must be to inspire itself more and more with this hope, and to direct itself with a view to this final and complete organization.

We must here pause to emphasize two consequences or cognate truths which stand in close connexion with what is now being advanced.

The first of these is that all goodness is essentially one, and therefore essentially Christian. We are not to suppose that Christianity is an exotic plant introduced into a region to which it is strange, and meant to overlay the course of nature with a foreign and external application. It is, on the contrary, the crown of a long development. It had in spirit and aspiration been working in the constitution of human life from the beginning. We are accustomed to trace this in the history of the Hebrew race. But there was a

1

Praeparatio Evangelica of a similar kind going on in other nations also; they were, to use St. Paul's words, 'seeking the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him.' There was an aspiration towards goodness and towards God, which we may trace out in various systems of religion and morality, most of all in the Greek philosophy, and which was a kind of faith in the good things that were to come. When the Brahman declares God to be the One, the Beginning, the Middle, and the End, the goodness of all that is good; when Buddha teaches that to abhor and cease from sin, this is the greatest blessing;' when we read in Confucius the evangelical maxim, 'What you would that men should do to you, that do to them;' when we find in the Zend Avesta such praise of truthfulness as made that central virtue the basis of moral training to every Persian, and such teaching of the unity of God and of immortality as is believed to have recalled the Jews during the captivity to those primary principles of religion2; when Plato3 argues that the test of righteousness is to act justly whether gods and man see it or not, and though crucifixion should be his reward; when Horace speaks in words worthy to stand beside those of the 46th Psalm, of the just man standing firm though the world should go to ruin around him; when Marcus Aurelius closes

1 These statements as to the Eastern religions are taken from The Faiths of the World, being Lectures at St. Giles' Church, Edinburgh, and from Bunsen's God in History.

2 For the influence of Zoroastrianism on Judaism, see Stanley's Jewish Church, iii. 184, and a remarkable passage in Lessing's Education of the Human Race. 3 Republic, Bk. ii. pp. 361-2, 366–7; Bk. x. p. 612.

4 Od. iii. 3.

his Soliloquies1 with the expression of resignation in death, 'Go in peace, for he that dismisses thee is at peace with thee;' we must recognize in such teaching, amid whatever faults of life or thought, the presence of the Spirit of God. And so it is now with all sincere moral life which does not as yet own the Christian name. Its virtues are not to be denied, still less to be represented, according to some of the Western (not the Eastern) fathers 2, as splendid vices, unless indeed. they are contented and self-sufficient instead of progressive and aspiring. Wherever justice and love are to be found in all their various manifestations, the love of kindred and of country, the generous and courteous demeanour of man to man, valour, love of truth, obedience, self-discipline, purity; wherever there is anything that is lovely and of good report; there is that which is an adumbration of, an aspiring towards, the image of Christ. We sometimes hear it said that an action or a character is good, but not Christian. What is usually meant by this is that it does not accord with some partial ecclesiastical standard of goodness. If it were really possible that there should be any virtue which is excluded from the Christian ideal, the Christian ideal would cease to be supreme, and would, consequently, cease to be divine. The confession of the divinity of our Lord is the assertion that all the scattered rays of light which shine in the world are gathered up in Him and radiate from Him again. What sometimes appears

1 Bk. xii. 36.

2 See Note X. On the contrast between the Eastern and Western Fathers in their view of the virtues of the heathen.