PHILOSOPHICAL SECTION.

RELIGIOUS ASPECTS OF THE DOCTRINE OF DEVEL

OPMENT.

BY THE REV. JAMES MCCOSH, D.D., LL.D., PRINCETON, N. J.,
President of the College of New Jersey.

I INVITE you into a temple in which are symbols and inscriptions fitted to instruct us as to the true character and history of our world. That temple is not made by human hands, but by him who created the heavens and the earth. It is larger, grander, and yet simpler than the rock-cut temples of India, than the columnar vistas of Egypt, than the cathedrals raised by the piety of the Middle Ages. Some of the great passes in the Alps, Andes, and Himalayas bear some likeness to it in length and height, but they are bare and sterile, whereas this is covered on both sides with figures full of meaning. At the grand entrance are two forms which arrest the attention. The one on the right consists of two tables of stone, representing law-moral and natural. The one on the left is an altar, with flowers and fruit on it, and a bleeding lamb. Here the vista bursts on our view, and extends on till the sides are lost in the dim distance; but at the farthest end is an object which no distance can lessen-the Rock of Ages, with a throne set on it which can not be moved, and the Ancient of Days seated on it, and in the midst"a Lamb as it had been slain;" and midway between the entrance and the end is a cross lifted up and a meek sufferer stretched upon it, but with a halo round his head, and above him, spanning the arch, a rainbow formed by the refraction of the pure white light which streams from him who dwelleth in light that is inaccessible to mortal eyes and full of glory. On each side of this extended gallery are symbolic figures, and these grow out of each other, and carry on a continued history from the past into the future onward into eternity. The great limners of the world are busily employed in drawing the pictures in this palace of the great King. I am to engage you for a little while in looking at them and reading the inscriptions.

I. Those on the Religious Side.-They have been written "at sundry times and in divers parts" by holy men as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. The first inscription that

meets our eye is "In the beginning" (¿v ápxñ)
the word used by the old Greek philoso-
phers when they were inquiring after the
origin and principle of all things. How far
back into the remote this carries us we can
not tell, but then "God created the heavens
and the earth." Then we see a brooding
darkness, but it is a cloud of seeds from
which the worlds are formed. "The earth
was without form and void," but the wind of
the Spirit blows upon it, and a voice is heard,
"Let there be light," and light appears, and
henceforth there is systematic order: there
is development in order or order in develop-
ment, and at the close of each day or period
God declares "all things to be very good."
As yet there is no sun nor moon; but there is
rotating evening and morning, and the even-
ing and the morning constitute the first day
—we know not of what length, for the clock
of time is not yet set up, and the word day
often means epoch in Scripture. In the sec-
ond day there is the rising of the aerial and
the sinking of the fluid. In the third day
the sea is divided from the land; on the
same day life appears, and has a developing
power in it, "for the earth brought forth
grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind,
whose seed is in itself after his kind."
the fourth, two solid lights appear, and be-
come the rulers and dividers of time. When
the fifth day rises out of the night, we see
the waters bringing forth the moving creat-
ures, and we have fishes and fowls, with
moving creatures and sea monsters, all with
a power of evolution, for the waters bring
forth after their kind, and every winged fowl
after his kind, and are enjoined to multiply
and fill the waters in the sea and the earth.
A sixth day dawns, and we see reptiles and
beasts, all after their kind; and in this epoch
appears a nobler creature made after the
image of God, and with the command to
be fruitful and multiply and replenish the
earth. This was the special work of Elo-
him, the one God with a plural nature, who,
on finishing the creation, leaves the living

On

creatures to develop by the powers with | To preserve a seed who may know the truth, which he has endowed them.

a special man and a special seed is set apart. Another vision joins on, and we have not Out of this seed comes the father both of Elohim, but the Lord Jehovah, the lawgiver, history and poetry, who, in language of unthe covenant-maker; and we have exhibited surpassed simplicity and grandeur, has deto us the relation in which man stands to scribed creation, and written the inflexible him. Man is represented as formed out of law in the granite of Sinai, and, himself a the dust of the ground, but with a divine prophet, spoken of a greater Prophet to come. breath breathed into him; he is put under Their greatest poet, himself a great warrior, law, with a promise of life and a threatening portrays the contest between the good and of death. We now come to the most myste- the evil going on in the world in warlike rious of all the records. A tempter, indi-imagery; and, feeling that he himself is not cating an earlier fall, suddenly intrudes, and the man to build the spiritual temple, behe uses the beast of the field and the lower cause his hands have been imbrued in blood, passions as his instruments; and henceforth points ever to a King who "in his majesty man exhibits devilish propensities of pride rides prosperously because of truth, meekand rebellion, on the one hand, and animal ness, and righteousness." There follows a propensities of appetite and lust on the oth-succession of prophets, each with his vision er; and there is sin propagating itself, act- and his parable; and the grandest of them, ual sin developing from original sin as a whose sentences flow like a river descending seed, and man driven into a world where are from the heights of heaven to water the thorns and thistles; and the multiplication | of the race is with sorrow, and man has to earn his bread with the sweat of his face, and his body has to return to the dust from which it was taken.

plains of earth, speaks of him as wounded, bruised, dying, and in the grave, but seeing the fruit of the travail of his soul, and extending his dominion till it covers the whole earth as the waters do the channel of the sea. Contemporaneous with these we have typical personages - prophets, priests, and kings-with their faces shining with light as they look forward to One suspended on the cross, and beyond to the throne of God. In the middle of the ages that great person appears, passing through suffering to conquest, fighting with sin and subduing it, connecting heaven and earth as by a ladder, and as a rainbow spanning the world.

There now appears a figure with an inscription containing the whole history of mankind in epitome. You see a Being possessed evidently of superhuman power, but with a truly human nature, having his heel bitten by a serpent, on whose head he sets his foot and crushes it forever. The attached writing is, "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." Henceforth there are Beyond the central figure a new life aptwo seeds, and each develops after its kind, pears. God comes forth as creator the first and they contend and must contend till the time since he rested after creating the heavgood gains the victory. A seed—not seeds, ens and the earth. Just as in the prehisas of many, but seed, as of one-is developed toric ages there had appeared a plant life, from the woman, but by a heavenly power, and an animal life, and an intellectual life, the Holy Ghost, who brought form out of the and a moral life, so now we have a spiritformless at creation; and this personage is ual life-it is the dispensation of the Spirit. represented as suffering, as having his heel Those who have sat for ages in darkness now bruised, and in his suffering destroying the see a great light. A new people come forth, power of evil. Henceforth our world is a not dwelling in a separate locality, but scatscene of contest. Man is warring with the tered among all people, like salt to preserve, unwilling soil, with privation, disappoint-like seed to propagate the life all over the ment, loss, disease, and death; one man con- world. With that spiritual life come othtending with another because of conflicting er forms of good, such as art, and civilizainterests and passions; one race and nation tion, and widening comforts, and the culfighting with another; and a large portion | tivation of the intellect, and the refining of of human history is a history of war. To restrain excessive wickedness the earth is visited with a flood-as geologists tell us it had often been before--but animal pairs are preserved to continue the races, and the rainbow is made to give assurance to the terrified fathers that waters will no more cover the earth. The purpose of God is fulfilled in the scattering of men; but the people, wherever they go, propagate the evil, and change the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and "to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things."

the feelings. But the soil has still to be plowed and harrowed in order to yield seed and fruit; the spiritual forces have to meet and overcome obstacles; and every good cause before it succeeds has to produce a martyr, out of whose ashes a new life proceeds. Not only so, but there is a contest in every heart; "the flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, and these are contrary the one to the other." The cause moves on, as the light comes from the sun in vibrations, as the tides come up upon the land-advancing and receding; but

they treat. The oldest of them, never surpassed for natural strength, has sung of the wrath of Achilles, and the evil thus wrought. Another, full of grace, has sung of arms, and of a hero fleeing from a burning city, and crossing a stormy sea to found an empire. In a later age we see one, who, though blind, has seen further than other men, aud has painted demoniacal pride, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Another hand has taken the lyre, and, with old Horace and modern songsters and satirists, has delineated the loves and the hatreds, the hopes and disappointments, the joys and sorrows, the aspirations and foibles, which agitate men's bosoms. A third class, led by our highbrowed dramatist, have exhibited on a stage what they believe to be the swaying motives of rich and poor, and have let us into the se

on the whole advancing. In the last symbolic book we hear a succession of trumpets sounding to call men to the battle, and see vials poured out to destroy the seeds of evil and purify the atmosphere. Many pass to and fro, and knowledge is increased; agencies for good are multiplied, and the kingdom extends till it spreads over the whole earth, which has rest for a thousand yearswe may suppose a day for a year. Beyond this the vision becomes dim from the distance, but we see the old adversary loosed for a little while, and the earth burned with fire, and the dazzling bright throne of judgment set up, and the God-man upon it, and every one giving an account of the deeds done in the body, whether they have been good or whether they have been evil; and then a separation-these descending by their own weight into their own place of black-crets of the working of ambition, passion, ness, and those carried up to heaven by their attraction to God, where they join in the song, "Salvation to our God that sitteth on the throne, and to the Lamb."

II. The Scientific Side. Here, as on the other side, we have a body of men busily employed in drawing figures and carving inscriptions, all to throw light on the past and present of our world. They are left to their native powers, and have to work by observation; they are not kept from error by any special guidance, and much that they write is laid in colors which fade, or in false colors, which require to be blotted out by those who come after. Still much remains, and shall remain forever, chiseled in the rock and never to be effaced, and this is growing and accumulating.

We have, first, lawgivers, who, finding that men are prone to evil, have proclaimed laws more or less perfect to secure obedience. Then there are moralists, from Socrates downward, inscribing on that wall what they have found written on their hearts, and which they regard, if only they read it aright, as a transcript of the holy nature and the supreme will of God. Alongside of them you may notice the broad-browed philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle onward, speculating on fate and chance, and the relation of the universe to God, and demonstrating that man's soul has a conscious unity and personality of which it can never be deprived. The next group consists of historians, who have given us lively narratives of the great deeds of our world, of the sacrifices which men have made for kindred and for country, but who have also to record enormous crimes, political feuds, and wars which have deluged the earth with blood. Next and more influential are those who express popular feeling, and have told what this world of men and women is, and have enshrined their thoughts in verse, that they may be caught more easily and remembered longer. Let us notice the topics of which

jealousy, pride, vanity, envy, revenge, caprice, fear, despair. The poet of the common people, in describing their joys, often sensual and mad, comes to the conclusion that "man is made to mourn." Romancers in these late years are taking up the same work, and are spinning tales which exhibit the strength and weakness of our natureyearning affections, blighted hopes, cruel betrayals-illustrated by seduction and murder. All of these artists describe this earth as a strangely mixed scene, with hills and hollows, with lakes sleeping in visible repose or rent by storms, with peaceful valleys and terrible gullies, with streams flowing gently and then pouring over fearful cataracts, with an ocean now inviting us to repose on its bosom, and anon tossing off men and vessels like seaweed.

But let us specially look at the grand truths inscribed by the expounders of science, as you see them there with their instruments for weighing and measuring, and their laborious calculations. On the religious side every thing was ascribed to God, proceeding orderly: "Thou hast established the earth and it abideth. They continue this day according to thine ordinances; for all are thy servants." A somewhat different but not inconsistent view is given of the same objects on the scientific side, where every thing is ascribed to what is called Law, which, however, when properly understood, implies a lawgiver. So these men, consciously or unconsciously, are unfolding to our view the plan of the great Creator. On this side of the hall of science you see inscribed, first, mathematical figures, such as squares, triangles, circles, spirals, and other sections of the cone, and it turns out that these regulate the forms and movements of objects in the heavens and in the earth, and are made to do so by a God who, as Plato says, geometrizes. Then you see science investigating inanimate nature, and showing that all the physical forces are modifications of one and the

it can not tell where this original matter came from. This matter must have properties: what are these properties? and whence? The impression left by the statement of some is that, if we only had this original matter, every thing else could be account

same force. Now it is seeking to discover the order and progression of animated beings, of plants and animals. It has shown that there are geological epochs: first an azoic period; then plants, marine and terrestrial; then the lower creatures with animal life; then fishes, fowls, reptiles, quad-ed for by evolution. But (2) we can not, rupeds; and, finally, man.

apart from a designing mind, account for In looking at these phenomena, men dis- that combination, that organization of agencover every where development or evolution. cies-mechanical, electrical, chemical, viIt appears in inanimate nature in suns, tal - which produces development. (3) It planets, and moons being evolved out of an can not say how animal sensation or feeling original matter, in a way which implies that came in. (4) It can not tell when or how the earth is older than the sun, and must instinct came in, how or when intelligence have existed for ages, and had light shining appeared, and affection and pity and love, upon it before the sun took his solid form. and the discernment of good and evil. (5) It is a characteristic of organized beings to In particular, it can not render any account produce others after their kind. Those who of the production of man's higher endowview development in the proper light see in ments, his powers of abstracting, generalizit only a form or manifestation of law. Grav-ing, and reasoning, from the individual obitation is a law of contemporaneous nature jects presented to him, of discovering necesextending over all bodies simultaneously-sary truth, and the obligation of virtue. over sun, moon, and stars the most remote. Development is a law of successive nature, and secures a connection between the past and the present, and I may add the future, securing a unity, and it may be a progres-them. Science, at all these places, comes to sion, from age to age. It is merely an exhibition of order running through successive ages, as the other is of order running through coexisting objects.

Science has not found these in the star-dust, nor were they in the ascidian, the fish, the monkey: how, then, did man get them, or, rather, whence came man as possessed of

chasms which it can not fill up. It has no facts whatever to support its theories, and is obliged to acknowledge that it has none; and as to the hypotheses which it calls in, they do not even seem to explain the essential facts, the appearance of new powers or agencies not known to be at work before.

But at this point difficulties and disputes arise. Is development so restricted that the plant and animal produces an offspring only after its kind: the lichen producing only But meanwhile, and as it is poring into the lichen, and the lily only the lily, and the these things, it is obliged to look at a set of oak only the oak, and the worm only the phenomena unknown to or overlooked by worm, and the bee only the bee, and the the older physicists and naturalists; has, horse only the horse. Or may not develop- as it looks to animated beings, come in view ment be so extended as to imply, in new cir- of a conflict of which it can give no account, cumstances and under new conditions, a and of a manifest evil. It speaks of worlds modification of kinds, that is, new species, coming out of star-dust, of worlds shattered and an advance from age to age from lower into fragments, and their materials scattered to higher forms. Some maintain that there into space; and in regard to our earth, of is no power in nature to change species, and upheavals, of sinkings of land, and the subthat when a new species appears it must bemergence of all living beings on it; of floods, by an immediate fiat of God acting independently of all natural agents. Others hold that there may be powers in nature-religious men say conferred by God—which grad-is and must be an evil-of the existence of ually raise species into higher forms by aggregation and selection. I am not sure that religion has any interest in holding absolutely by the one side or other of this question, which it is for scientific men to settle. I am not sure that religion is entitled to insist that every species of insect has been created by a special fiat of God, with no secondary agent employed.

But in prosecuting these investigations science comes to walls of adamant, which will not fall down at its command, and which, if it tries to break through, will only prostrate it, and cause it to exhibit its weakness before the world. (1) It can not develop without a matter to develop from, and

of denudations, of volcanoes, of icebergs, and long periods of shivering cold. All these might not be evils, but then it speaks of what

pain. When living beings appear, it can not tell how, it is obliged to speak of a struggle for existence, the stronger devouring the weaker, and innumerable diseases preying on the animal frame, of individuals dying, and races perishing from want of sustenance or amid overwhelming convulsions. When man appears, it can not tell how, but on a scene evidently prepared for him, he carries the seeds of disease in his very person, and he has to suffer pain of body and torture of mind. Around him are storms to destroy and disappointments crossing his path, and within are selfishness and craving lusts and repinings and passions, which war against each other, and war against the soul.

True, there are in all these objects law | light, and for windows to be opened to let and order and beneficence, obvious and press- it in. ing itself on the notice. Forces, blind in Meanwhile that other and higher law, the themselves, are made by their combination moral law-the law written on the heartto produce the most perfect mathematical has something very important to utter, and it figures. Beauty appears every where-in pronounces it in the name of God, the lawsky and earth, in planet and plant. Every giver. It affirms of itself that it is unbendorgan of the animal frame is good in itself, ing as stone, and yet finds that man has and liable to accomplish its evident pur- broken it. It points emphatically to a judg pose. There is order in star and sun and ment to come -it can not say where or earth, but order coming out of disorder. It when, but certain to come -as certain as is beauty in flower, in young man and maid- that there is a law, an eternal law, and a en coming out of dust and returning to dust; God to guard it. The scene closes with each we see it in that foliage, so beautiful even one placed before that bar to give an acwhen it is fading; does not the father feel count of the deeds done in the body, whether it when he commits the body of his son to they have been good, or whether they have the grave, "dust to dust, ashes to ashes." been evil; and there it leaves him, in the Man has high aspirations, but it is only to midst of the conflagration of worlds, with feel how far he falls beneath them. All these undying matter taking new shapes, and a are facts— quite as much so as the move- soul-certainly as undying as that matter ments of the planets in elliptic orbits, as ready to be consigned to its own place of the laws of development in the vegetable light or of darkness. and animal kingdoms. The proudest thinkers, as they are brought face to face with these facts, are obliged to acknowledge that they can not discover a final cause in many of the most common agents of nature; as, for instance, in the derangement to which every organ of the frame is liable, and in the parasites which dwell in and feed on the bodies of all our noblest animals. The microscope shows us how exquisitely they are formed, but all to inflict the more excrucia-portant difference: the one tells us that the ting pain. We may apologize for some of these things, but we can not explain themfor instance, the existence of incurable sorrow and madness. Physiologists know that the organs of the body—the eye, the stomach, the liver, the brain-might have been so constructed as not to be liable to disease and pain, to which they are exposed, not by accident, but by their very nature and struct-world: the one as appointed by God; the other ure. Combined science, as it looks into the future, is obliged to tell us that the world and all that is therein shall first have its heat exhausted, and then, in the disintegration, shall be burned with fire; and what the new order of things to issue out of this ele-Dana assures us that since man appeared gemental fire it can not tell.

Now this is, in fact, the sum of what science has been able to say about our world: Our cosmos rises out of dust, is formed into beautiful shapes by warring powers, becomes order and progressive order, and ends in dissolving heat. Our earth comes out of a cloud and ends in a conflagration. The highest being, as he enters it, makes known his presence by a cry, and ends his march through it in the grave. Surely in all this, while there is much in the evident order and beneficence to elevate, there is not a little to awe and to humble us. The profoundest thinkers feel that they have come here to an unknown power behind and beneath all, and are impelled under a choking feeling to cry out, like the dying Goethe, for

III. Having taken a cursory glance at each of the sides of this rock-cut gallery, let us now look back upon the two. We see in a general way that there is a correspondence between them. In both we have moral law set forth-in the one by the conscience, in the other by the commands and prohibitions in Eden, by the tables of stone on Mount Sinai, and by the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament. But there is this im

law has been broken, and in proof points to the wickedness in the world, and the guilty remorse which agitates men's bosoms, but reveals no way by which the sin can be forgiven; whereas the other, while it declares that sin has been committed, clearly makes known a way by which the sinner may be reconciled to God. Both reveal order in the

as discovered by man. In both we have progression in the divine workmanship, and the order, as Dr. Guyot has shown, is very much the same. The Bible says that after man was made God rested from creation, and Dr.

ology does not disclose a single new species of plant or animal. It is surely a curious circumstance that this picture of the formation of our earth was drawn upward of three thousand years before geology started, and has continued unchanged amid the shiftings of science. The inspired record tells us, what anthropology confirms, that man has a twofold nature- a body formed out of the dust of the ground, and a spirit after the image of God breathed into him. Nor is there any contradiction as to chronology. For, first, geology has no clock to tell us the timewhat it reveals is not absolute, but relative. It tells us that a certain epoch must have been before another epoch; but its deductions are very uncertain as to how far back any one epoch-say the glacial epoch-car