Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/338

far as his corporeal frame is concerned,"^[1] is created, as other species were, by evolution from lower forms; if he was not, as we have been accustomed to think, an independent creation, but related through his whole bodily structure with "the beasts that perish"; if he was not an absolutely new departure, but the last term in a progressive series—how does this new view affect our Christian faith?

We might have been ready to answer. It no more touches the Christian view of human nature than a scientific proof, if it had been possible, that our blessed Lord was very man would affect the truth of his divinity. And the analogy is a very close one. It is not heresy to assert that Christ is Άνθρωπος, but that he is ψιλὸς ᾆνθρωπος, man and nothing more. Similarly, say what we will of the affinities of man's physical nature, it is only when we deny that he is anything more that we really degrade him. As Bacon somewhere puts it—

They that deny a God destroy man's nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is an ignoble creature.

Unfortunately, Christian apologists have missed an important distinction. They have not seen that their controversy with a Darwinian agnostic is a controversy with his agnosticism, not with his Darwinism; with his limitation of all knowledge to the facts of sense, not with any doctrine he may scientifically prove as to the interrelations of the facts observed.

We are constantly told that Darwinism is degrading, that it is unworthy of the dignity of man, that it is a "gospel of dirt." If such a charge had come from a representative of those nations which held the descent of man from gods or demigods, it would have been intelligible enough, but it sounds strange in the mouth of those who believe that "the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground." Indeed, what in Darwinism is called a "gospel of dirt," appears in the Bible as a "gospel of grace." We naturally, as Kingsley says, seek—

To set up some "dignity of human nature," some innate superiority to the animals, on which we may pride ourselves as our own possession, and not return thanks with fear and trembling for it as the special gift of Almighty God.^[2]

But the inspired writers "revel in self-depreciation" that they may the more exalt the love and condescension of God. The moral, as distinct from the scientific, teaching of the Bible can not be mistaken in this matter. Man made in the image of God, inbreathed with the breath of life, is formed of the dust of the ground. God's method is always to choose "the base things of the world and things which are despised," and use them for his

1. Darwin, ii, p. 140.
2. "Prose Idylb," p. 22.