And when the sacred things of life are treated in this manner—­when moral conduct is showed to be evolved by a continuous process from “conduct in general,” the conduct of an “infusorium or a cephalopod,” or even of wind-mills or water-wheels, it is not surprising if the authority of the moral law seems to be undermined, and that “devout souls” are apprehensive of the results of science.  “Does law so analyzed coerce you much?” asks Browning.

The derivation of spiritual from natural laws thus appears to be fatal to the former; and religious teachers naturally think that it is necessary for their cause to snap the links of the chain of evolution, and, like Professor Drummond, to establish absolute gaps, not only between the inorganic and the organic worlds, but also between the self-conscious life of man and the mysterious, spiritual life of Christ, or God.  But it seems to me that, in their antagonism to evolution, religious teachers are showing the same incapacity to distinguish between their friends and their foes, which they previously manifested in their acceptance of the Kantian doctrine of “things in themselves,”—­a doctrine which placed God and the soul beyond the power of speculative reason either to prove or disprove.  It is, however, already recognized that the attempt of Mansel and Hamilton to degrade human reason for the behoof of faith was really a veiled agnosticism; and a little reflection must show that the idea of evolution, truly interpreted, in no wise threatens the degradation of man, or the overthrow of his spiritual interests.  On the contrary, this idea is, in all the history of thought, the first constructive hypothesis which is adequate to the uses of ethics and religion.  By means of it, we may hope to solve many of the problems arising from the nature of knowledge and moral conduct, which the lower category of cause turned into pure enigmas.  It seems, indeed, to contain the promise of establishing the science of man, as intelligent, on a firm basis; on which we may raise a superstructure, comparable in strength and superior in worth, to that of the science of nature.  And, even if the moral science must, like philosophy, always return to the beginning—­must, that is, from the necessity of its nature, and not from any complete failure—­it will still begin again at a higher level now that the idea of evolution is in the field.

It now remains to show in what way the idea of evolution leaves room for religion and morality; or, in other words, to show how, so far from degrading man to the level of the brute condition, and running life down into “purely physical conditions,” it contains the promise of establishing that idealistic view of the world, which is maintained by art and religion.