brought about by the environment acting directly on the body, inborn germinal variations are unexplained.

own.

Professor J. A. Thomson is also disinclined to believe that there is evidence to prove that bodily modifications individually acquired can be inherited, largely because of the difficulty of conceiving how such modifications can affect the germ cells. Of some of the most interesting of recent experiments and suggestions he is only able to say that they are ingenious theories to explain what we do not know to be a fact (p. 178). All he says is that "The fact [of Evolution] is accepted by all competent naturalists." On the other hand, full weight must be allowed to Prof. Soddy's emphatic repudiation of the idea of evolution in his own domain of physics and chemistry. He will only allow it of living organisms, and life for him is an interloper in an eternal and independently existing world with mechanical processes of its He resents as a fantastic whim the idea that even a trace of the consecutive progress that characterises the world of life is reflected in the ways of the material universe (p. 404). But his "matter" is very active; the atoms he deals with are constituents of the whole "universe"; there is continuity between them and its cosmos. Nor do other writers in the same volume seem to feel Prof. Soddy's objection to the term "evolution " as descriptive of the way in which the world has come to be what it is. Dr. Jeans Cosmogony," Dr. Jeffreys on "The Evolution of the Earth as a Planet," and Dr. Watts on Geology," have no quarrel with the idea. Dr. Watts, indeed, speaks of "this great doctrine which now is finding its application far outside the organic world, in the mechanism of the earth itself and beyond that again to the outer universe" (p. 66). They all, in their different departments, by the historical sketches of earlier theories which they give, show how widely the present point of view differs from the opinions that prevailed in the past. Whereas of old, in Dr. Wilson's words," in every sphere of observation discontinuity was assumed," now" the conception of continuity has become axiomatic."

on

Does this continuity extend from the atom to living beings? This is, of course, the question which remains unanswered; though, in view of all the evidence that has accumulated on either side, so to say, of the supposed gap that separates "dead" from living" matter, it may be held that the onus probundi now lies on those who assume discontinuity.

At present theology can still, if it will, assert a break, an intrusion from outside, a new creation, at the origin of life; but it has to push it far back behind the origin of man to the amoebic protoplasm and probably also to the earliest organic vegetation. Within the range of biological investigation at all events evolution is established from the amoeba (along various lines of variation and specialisation, not without relapses, and never without an unusual combination of circumstances or conditions) to the common ancestor of the anthropoid ape and man, from that common ancestor to primitive man, and from primitive man to the highest type of man that has yet emerged.

It is of special interest here to note that while there are still biologists who are convinced that the best description of the processes they observe can be given in mechanistic terms, and that within the province of their science no others ought to be used; yet there are also to-day biologists of the first rank who are not satisfied that the observed facts are fully described without the recognition of a factor or factors that cannot be measured and known. The writers in this volume belong to the latter school. It is hardly "orthodox " yet. The orthodox view is expressed elsewhere. For instance, Mr. Needham in the volume "Science, Religion and Reality says (p. 257): "The biochemist and the biophysicist . . . must be must be thorough-going mechanists." He seems to regard the newer school as leaving science for metaphysics and trying to answer the question-why? But their argument really is that you cannot describe the processes and answer the question-how ? without allowing for a kind of trend, or urge, or striving in the organism whose ways are being watched. There are traces, suggestions, much lower down the scale of life, of what higher up the scale we know as consciousness, purpose, mind. And Mr. Needham himself is in no way concerned to claim that the full explanation or even description of the phenomena of living beings can be given in biological language. The scientific method, which is after all itself a mental product, is not competent to give us final descriptions of life, without calling to its aid the other interpretative mental products, such as philosophy (p. 223). ... Now that the assumptions on which the triumph of mechanistic biology in the last century is based have been well examined, it is seen that for its own sphere it is a real triumph; but, at the same time, its jurisdiction over other fields cannot be admitted (p. 257). . . . The earlier mechanistic biology before the era of experimental science did not know its own limitations (p 257).

The conclusion is that the biology of to-day is not incompatible with religion. It is generally allowed to-day that the method of science is selective. It abstracts certain data, facts or processes, which it can observe or " measure" and describe, and so it builds up a mental picture of what it finds and claims that this is true, so far as it goes. But it is an abstraction. "Biological " man, for instance, the creature of the laboratory, is not the whole man. Nor again, assuredly, would a "religious" description of man, by itself, be any less misleading if offered as a full account of him. So far as the account biology gives is true, it must be included in a complete account. Our anthropology must be compatible with the facts about man, with his history and place in the universe as indicated by biology and all the other sciences. It is part of Dr. Wilson's argument that these facts, so far from being incompatible with religion, give us " a fresh glimpse of reality, a fresh light on life," and suggest" an evangel which will grip," coming to our generation in some real sense as "news," and introducing harmony into the conception of life as a whole. The "evangel is based, of course, on the conception of God, for which science

as such has no use.

Dr. Wilson has always been a prophet from the days when, as Headmaster of Clifton, with a Rationalist Society actively at work at Bristol, he was drawn into the controversies of the 'eighties about the Bible and science, and began to give and publish a series of lectures and addresses of outstanding value at the time. To many a young man in those awkward days he must have seemed to be the only clergyman in high place who was talking sense. This personal reminiscence is suggested by the retrospect of his own experience that gives a living interest and persuasiveness to the confessio fidei which he contributes to this book.

Prof. J. A. Thomson, a biologist, has written of the goal of evolution as love, and Prof. Alexander, who is perhaps the most thorough-going of evolutionist philosophers, interprets the whole process as tending to Deity." Dr. Wilson quotes Huxley's adverse verdict on the cosmic process, with perhaps not fully considered approval, except so far as it insists that man must put out all his powers to further the process of which the goal is Deity and love. For it is in this conviction that "the world means good' that the strongest incentive to man to put himself on that side is found, especially if we may assume that man is himself the highest

emergent of the process, the fullest manifestation of its trend, or in biological terms the very cell of the factors on which progress to the goal depends.

The whole scheme of Christian theology needs to be thought out afresh. It is the organic expression of the Christian religion. Ever since the dawn of the new knowledge it has gradually been sloughing off many an idea that once seemed vital to its being. Dr. Wilson speaks of theology's "first thoughts suggested by the primitive science of the times, and of its "second thoughts" when knowledge of the facts had superseded earlier ideas. He indicates the wide range of these "second thoughts," and at once proclaims as a prophet, and pleads as a lover of truth, that when the second thoughts are accepted the revised theology will obtain a hold on the wills and imagination of men that will sustain and guide them as the present theology has ceased to do. He leaves it to the theologians to work the matter out, but he points unerringly in the right direction, and by his essay he has done much to prepare a public for the few theologians who are likely to attempt the task to which he invites them.

The starting-point, he argues, in the conception of God must be the human spirit. We must seek God within. As far as this globe is concerned, we men are the latest and highest result of the vast evolutionary process, and it is thus to the nature of man that we must look for the plainest indications of the purpose and meaning of that process. Man must be the incipient vehicle of self-expression, the incarnation in some degree of the "Unseen Creator Spirit Himself." So the basis for theology must be the study of God as indwelling. "God is not to be found by us in nature apart from man, but only as the Spirit dwelling in us." The world of matter and life and spirit is one scene of orderly and continuous development. There is no place in it for the old antinomies of a natural sphere and a supernatural sphere, or for the idea of an irruption of one sphere into the other. The whole process is Divine and we are led by a continuous chain from the lower to the higher in the evolution of human personality, till we come to the One Manifestation in which men have most fully found and seen and known God.

The traditional doctrines of Man and Sin and Atonement have been largely inherited from a primitive past, and have not yet been christianized. The great fact that stands out is that in the evolutionary process the emergence of good has taken place.

Dr. Wilson proclaims and pleads. What he proclaims seems to be on the whole supported by the evidence and the arguments set forth in the preceding chapters of the book, which he had not read before his own contribution to it was written. His plea for a revised theology must be left to speak for itself as he has presented it. Summary of it would rob it not only of its special flavour but also of some of its force. Dr. Wilson knows the difficulties in the way, but he appeals to the theologians to recognise that the task is incumbent on them. He does not mean the kind of reconstruction of the old theology from which only restatement results, with all the old presuppositions retained intact. It is just these presuppositions that the facts of evolution, as presented in this volume, oblige us to abandon. For anyone who is habituated to the traditional system the temptation is to ignore this dominating fact, and to concentrate attention on anything in the new science of to-day that can be used in support of theological ideas that the science of fifty years ago denied.

It may be useful, therefore, resisting this temptation, to consider some of the chief features which would characterize an evolutionist theology. An evolutionist theology, like any other theology, has as its subject the relations between man, the world, and God. It assumes all three. It is man's own making, man's own interpretation of his experience. In a sense he must always be the centre of the scheme. His concern is always with his own place in "the sum of things for ever speaking" by which he is encompassed. "The world" is his comprehensive label for one set of his experiences, and " God" the formula by which he accounts for other experiences, equally real, and even more intimately apprehended. The pictures man forms for himself of these experiences are the primitive stuff of all theology, and the early pictures in the forms of folk-lore and myth and legend persist and survive long after they have ceased to correspond with the knowledge of the times. They do this, not because they have "survival value," but because they have been incorporated in a sacred literature, and the ideas that inspired them are among the factors of the accepted theological construction.

No theologian can be at ease unless he recognises how largely this picture-thinking of religion has controlled the "Christian theology of the past. It is not only that the first Christian theologians accepted as the basis of much of their reasoning the