The history of life is a grand drama.  “Paradise Lost” and Shakespeare’s plays are but fragments of it.  But without intelligence they could never have been composed; without a choice of means and ends they could never have been placed upon the stage.  Does the plot of this grander drama of evolution demand no intelligence in its ultimate cause and producer?  Is the succession of steps, each succeeding the other in such order as to lead to truth and right and continual progress toward a spiritual goal, is this plot possible without a great composer who has seen the end from the beginning?  Could it ever have been executed upon the stage of the world, and perhaps of the universe, without an executing will?

Now I freely grant you that this is no mathematical demonstration.  Natural science does not deal in demonstrations, it rests upon the doctrine of probabilities; just as we have to order our whole lives according to this doctrine.  Its solution of a problem is never the only conceivable answer, but the one which best fits and explains all the facts and meets the fewest objections.  The arguments for the existence of a personal God are far stronger than those in favor of any theory of evolution.  But we very rightly test the former arguments, indefinitely more rigidly and severely, just because our very life hangs on them.  On the other hand, we should not reject them as useless, because they are not of an entirely different kind from those on which all the actions and beliefs of our common daily life are based.  There is a scepticism which is merely a credulity of negations.  This also we should avoid.

We have considered a few of the reasons for thinking that, with the material, there must be something spiritual in environment, that if the woof is material the warp is God.  Here we need not delay long.  Blank atheism seems to be at present unpopular and generally regarded as unscientific.  The so-called philosophic materialism of the present day seems to be in general far nearer to pantheism than to the old form of materialism which recognized only atoms and mechanism.  Atheism as a power to deform the lives of men has, for the present, lost its hold, and even agnosticism is respectful.  The materialism against which we have to struggle is not that of the school, but of the shop, of society, of life.  There are comparatively few now who avow a system of philosophy making mindless atoms their first cause.

But there is a far grosser, more deadly materialism of the heart and will.  It sits unrebuked in the front pews of our churches and controls alike church and parish, caucus and legislature.  It calls on us all to fall down and worship, promising the world if we obey, the cross if we refuse.  And we bow to it; and that is all it asks, for a nod on our part makes us its slaves.  It is the idolatry of money, position, shrewdness, learning—­in one word, of success.  It takes all the strength out of our morality, loyalty and obedience to God out of