Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/339

purposes. The chosen people traced their descent from "a Syrian ready to perish." They were the "fewest of all people," and constantly reminded of their origin. "Remember that thou wast a bond-servant." "Look unto the rocks whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged." And yet they were what they were, the destined repository of the oracles of God, and the religious teachers of the world. The Bible at least gives no color to a view which refuses a degraded origin for man.

But Darwinism, dealing with man, as it is bound to do, simply from the side of his animal and corporeal nature, has done something to give man his true place in the physical universe. It has, by the application of its own methods and its own tests, recognized him as the roof and crown of all things visible. And by so doing it has rendered any form of Nature-worship henceforth impossible. The highest, or the least degrading of these, was the worship of the sun. When Anaxagoras ventured the speculation that the great god Helios was a mass of molten metal, he was condemned as a heretic. Science has trodden in his footsteps, and we know now that the sun is a very large ball of solid and gaseous matter, in a state of fierce incandescence, and supported by involuntary contributions. It has been "found out," as completely as the Boxley rood, when people were shown its works—

No man [as the Duke of Argyll says] can worship a ball of fire, however big; nor can he feel grateful to it, nor love it, nor adore it, even though its beams be to hira the very light of life. Neither in it, nor in the mere physical forces of which it is the center, can we see anything approaching to the rank and dignity of even the humblest human heart.^[1]

Nor can we any longer worship organic Nature. For we are ourselves, if Darwinism is true, the last term in the series. If man must have a visible god, he must henceforth worship himself or something lower. In Genesis he is made lord of the visible world, to have dominion over the fish of the sea, and the fowl of the air, and every living thing that moveth upon the earth. What Genesis speaks of as the will of God, Darwinism reads in Nature as a fact:

Man [says Darwin] in the rudest state in which he now exists is the most dominant animal that has ever appeared on this earth. He has spread more widely than any other highly organized form, and all others have yielded before him.^[2]

It is not true, then, that Darwinism degrades man, for in tracing his descent it chronicles his rise from the lowest origin to the highest order of being of which science has any knowledge.

And what about the soul? If man, in his animal nature, was evolved from lower creatures, when did God "breathe into his

1. "Unity of Nature," p. 309.
2. "Descent of Man," p. 48.