We were taught - some of us at least - by Holy Scripture, that without Him not a sparrow fell to the ground, and that the very hairs of our head were all numbered; that the whole history of the universe was made up, in fact, of an infinite network of special providences. If, then, that should be true which a great naturalist writes, 'It may be metaphorically said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being, in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life,' - if this, I say, were proved to be true, ought God's care and God's providence to seem less or more magnificent in our eyes? Of old it was said by Him without whom nothing is made - 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' Shall we quarrel with physical science, if she gives us evidence that those words are true?"And - understand it well - the grand passage I have just quoted need not be accused of substituting "natural selection for God."In any case natural selection would be only the means or law by which God works, as He does by other natural laws. We do not substitute gravitation for God, when we say that the planets are sustained in their orbits by the law of gravitation. The theory about natural selection may be untrue, or imperfect, as may the modern theories of the "evolution and progress" of organic forms:
let the man of science decide that. But if true, the theories seem to me perfectly to agree with, and may be perfectly explained by, the simple old belief which the Bible sets before us, of a LIVINGGOD: not a mere past will, such as the Koran sets forth, creating once and for all, and then leaving the universe, to use Goethe's simile, "to spin round his finger;" nor again, an "all-pervading spirit," words which are mere contradictory jargon, concealing, from those who utter them, blank Materialism: but One who works in all things which have obeyed Him to will and to do of His good pleasure, keeping His abysmal and self-perfect purpose, yet altering the methods by which that purpose is attained, from aeon to aeon, ay, from moment to moment, for ever various, yet for ever the same. This great and yet most blessed paradox of the Changeless God, who yet can say "It repenteth me," and "Behold, Iwork a new thing on the earth," is revealed no less by nature than by Scripture; the changeableness, not of caprice or imperfection, but of an Infinite Maker and "Poietes," drawing ever fresh forms out of the inexhaustible treasury of His primaeval Mind; and yet never throwing away a conception to which He has once given actual birth in time and space, (but to compare reverently small things and great) lovingly repeating it, re-applying it; producing the same effects by endlessly different methods; or so delicately modifying the method that, as by the turn of a hair, it shall produce endlessly diverse effects; looking back, as it were, ever and anon over the great work of all the ages, to retouch it, and fill up each chasm in the scheme, which for some good purpose had been left open in earlier worlds; or leaving some open (the forms, for instance, necessary to connect the bimana and the quadrumana)to be filled up perhaps hereafter when the world needs them; the handiwork, in short, of a living and loving Mind, perfect in His own eternity, but stooping to work in time and space, and there rejoicing Himself in the work of His own hands, and in His eternal Sabbaths ceasing in rest ineffable, that He may look on that which He hath made, and behold it is very good.
I speak, of course, under correction; for this conclusion is emphatically matter of induction, and must be verified or modified by ever-fresh facts: but I meet with many a Christian passage in scientific books, which seems to me to go, not too far, but rather not far enough, in asserting the God of the Bible, as Saint Paul says, "not to have left Himself without witness," in nature itself, that He is the God of grace. Why speak of the God of nature and the God of grace as two antithetical terms? The Bible never, in a single instance, makes the distinction; and surely, if God be (as He is) the Eternal and Unchangeable One, and if (as we all confess)the universe bears the impress of His signet, we have no right, in the present infantile state of science, to put arbitrary limits of our own to the revelation which He may have thought good to make of Himself in nature. Nay, rather, let us believe that, if our eyes were opened, we should fulfil the requirement of Genius, to "see the universal in the particular," by seeing God's whole likeness, His whole glory, reflected as in a mirror even in the meanest flower; and that nothing but the dulness of our own souls prevents them from seeing day and night in all things, however small or trivial to human eclecticism, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself fulfilling His own saying, "My Father worketh hitherto, and Iwork."To me it seems (to sum up, in a few words, what I have tried to say) that such development and progress as have as yet been actually discovered in nature, bear every trace of having been produced by successive acts of thought and will in some personal mind; which, however boundlessly rich and powerful, is still the Archetype of the human mind; and therefore (for to this I confess Ihave been all along tending) probably capable, without violence to its properties, of becoming, like the human mind, incarnate.
