from generation.  But the principle of the Moral Law, its universality, its supremacy, cannot come out of any development of human nature any more than the necessity of mathematical truth can so come.  It stands not on experience, and is its own evidence.  Nor indeed have any of the attempts to show that everything in man (religion included) is the product of Evolution ever touched the question how this conception of universal supremacy comes in.  It is treated as if it were an unauthorised extension from our own experience to what lies beyond all experience.  This, however, is to deny the essence of the Moral Law altogether:  that Law is universal or it is nothing.

Now, when we compare the account of the creation and of man given by the doctrine of Evolution with that given in the Bible, we see at once that the two are in different regions.  The purpose of giving the accounts is different; the spirit and character of the accounts is different; the details are altogether different.  The comparison must take note of the difference of spirit and aim before it can proceed at all.

It is then quite certain, and even those who contend for the literal interpretation of this part of the Bible will generally admit, that the purpose of the revelation is not to teach Science at all.  It is to teach great spiritual and moral lessons, and it takes the facts of nature as they appear to ordinary people.  When the creation of man is mentioned there is clearly no intention to say by what processes this creation was effected, or how much time it took to work out those processes.  The narrative is not touched by the question, Was this a single act done in a moment, or a process lasting through millions of years?  The writer of the Book of Genesis sees the earth peopled, as we may say, by many varieties of plants and animals.  He asserts that God made them all, and made them resemble each other and differ from each other.  He knows nothing and says nothing of the means used to produce their resemblances or their differences.  He takes them as he sees them, and speaks of their creation as God’s work.  Had he been commissioned to teach his people the science of the matter, he would have had to put a most serious obstacle in the way of their faith.  They would have found it almost impossible to believe in a process of creation so utterly unlike all their own experience.  And it would have been quite useless to them besides, since their science was not in such a condition as to enable them to coordinate this doctrine with any other.  As science it would have been dead; and as spiritual truth it would have been a hindrance.

But he had, nevertheless, great ideas to communicate, and we can read them still.