Let me speak freely a few words on this important matter. Geology has disproved the old popular belief that the universe was brought into being as it now exists by a single fiat. We know that the work has been gradual; that the earth"In tracts of fluent heat began, The seeming prey of cyclic storms, The home of seeming random forms, Till, at the last, arose the man."And we know, also, that these forms, "seeming random" as they are, have appeared according to a law which, as far as we can judge, has been on the whole one of progress, - lower animals (though we cannot yet say, the lowest) appearing first, and man, the highest mammal, "the roof and crown of things," one of the latest in the series. We have no more right, let it be observed, to say that man, the highest, appeared last, than that the lowest appeared first. It was probably so, in both cases; but there is as yet no positive proof of either; and as we know that species of animals lower than those which already existed appeared again and again during the various eras, so it is quite possible that they may be appearing now, and may appear hereafter: and that for every extinct Dodo or Moa, a new species may be created, to keep up the equilibrium of the whole. This is but a surmise: but it may be wise, perhaps, just now, to confess boldly, even to insist on, its possibility, lest any should fancy, from our unwillingness to allow it, that there would be ought in it, if proved, contrary to sound religion.
I am, I must honestly confess, more and more unable to perceive anything which an orthodox Christian may not hold, in those physical theories of "evolution," which are gaining more and more the assent of our best zoologists and botanists. All that they ask us to believe is, that "species" and "families," and indeed the whole of organic nature, have gone through, and may still be going through, some such development from a lowest germ, as we know that every living individual, from the lowest zoophyte to man himself, does actually go through. They apply to the whole of the living world, past, present, and future, the law which is undeniably at work on each individual of it. They may be wrong, or they may be right: but what is there in such a conception contrary to any doctrine - at least of the Church of England? To say that this cannot be true; that species cannot vary, because God, at the beginning, created each thing "according to its kind," is really to beg the question; which is - Does the idea of "kind" include variability or not? and if so, how much variability?Now, "kind,"or "species," as we call it, isdefined nowhere in the Bible. What right have we to read our own definition into the word? - and that against the certain fact, that some "kinds" do vary, and that widely, - mankind, for instance, and the animals and plants which he domesticates. Surely that latter fact should be significant, to those who believe, as I do, that man was created in the likeness of God. For if man has the power, not only of making plants and animals vary, but of developing them into forms of higher beauty and usefulness than their wild ancestors possessed, why should not the God in whose image he is made possess the same power? If the old theological rule be true - "There is nothing in man which was not first in God" (sin, of course, excluded) - then why should not this imperfect creative faculty in man be the very guarantee that God possesses it in perfection?
