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Show 254 DARWINIAN A. than that the whole stress should bear upon a single po·m t , and that perhaps the authority o. f .a n interpreDta - tion of Scripture. A consensu-s of opiniOn upon r. Hodge's ground, for instance ~al~hough bet:er gua:ded than that of Dr. Dawson), If It were still possible, wo uld-to say the least-probablyh no.t[' at a.ll. help to reconcile science and religion. T ere1ore, It Is not to be reO'retted that the diversities of view among accredited ~heologians and theological naturalists are about as wide and as equably distributed between the extremes (and we may add that the vi~ws them~elves are quite as hypothetical) as those whiC~ prevail among the various naturalists and natural ph1losophers of the day. . . As· a theologian, Mr. Henslow doubtless IS not to be compared with the veteran professor at Princeton. On the other hand, he has the advantage of being a naturalist, and the son of a naturalist, as well as a clergyman: consequently he feels the full f~rce of an array of facts in nature, and of the naturalmferenc~s from them, which the theological professor, from h1s Biblical standpoint, and on his implicit assu~ption that the Old Testament must needs teach true sCience, can hardly be ·expected to appreciate. Accor~ingly, ~ naturalist would be apt to say of Dr. Hodges exposition of "theories of the universe" and kindred topics- and in no captious spirit-that whether right or wrong on particular points, he is not often right or wrong in the way of a man of scie~?e.. . Probably from the lack of fam1har1ty w1th preva-lent ideas and their history, the theologians are apt_ to . suppose that scientific men of the present day are tak-. EVOLUTION AND THEOLOGY. 255 ing up theories of evolution in pure wantonness or mei:e superfluity of naughtiness; that it would have been quite possible, as well as more proper, to leave all such matters alone. Quieta non movere is doubtless a wise rule upon such subjects, so long as it is fairly applicable. But the time for its application in respect to questions of the origin and relations of existing species has gone by. To ignore them is to imitate the foolish bird that seeks security by hiding its head in the sand. Moreover, the naturalists did not force _ these questions upon the world; but the world they study forced them upon the naturalists. How these questions of derivation came naturally and inevitably t·o be revived, how the cumulative probability that the existing are derived from preexisting forms impressed itself upon the minds of many naturalists and thinkers, Mr. Henslow has briefly explained in the introduction and illustrated in the succeeding chapters of the first part of his book. Science, he declares, has been compelled to take up the hypothesis of the evo- ·lution of living things as better explaining all the phenomena. In his opinion, it has become "infinitely more probable that all living and extinct beings have been developed or evolved by natural laws of generation from preexisting forms, than that they, with all their innumerable races and varieties, should owe their existences severally to Creative fiats." This doctrine, which even Dr. Hodge allows may possibly be held in a theistic sense, and which, as we suppose, is so held 6r viewed by a great proportion of the naturalists of our day, :Mr. Henslow maintains is fully compatible with dogmatic as well as natural theology |
