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attitude upon the question, while not inclining to favour the super- angelic position of man. Over this subject the veil of Isis must, we suppose, largely remain; but the Christian theology of to-day, while desiring not to intrude into things not seen, and assigning to angels in their defectibility no more than an individual existence, attaches to them the law of historic growth, whereby, though free from actual transgression, they are conceived as passing from stages of comparative imperfection to more exquisite completeness, more expanded sublimity of life, and it lays new stress on the illustration they afford of the possibility of sinless development despite their finitude.

The progress of modern Christian thought is conspicuously seen in the way mechanical modes of interpretation of what is known as the Hebrew cosmogony have been left behind, and creation has come to be regarded in more satisfying ways as a continuous process of the all-pervasive and selfrevealing God, in the spirit of Him who said, "My Father worketh hitherto: I also work." The cosmology of Genesis, evolutionist with divine initiative as the point of departure of

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the evolution, in accordance with the theistic conception, "In the beginning God," has been much more satisfactorily apprehended within very recent years as turning not upon a literalistic interpretation or otherwise of the term "day"— so beautiful and apt when rightly understood-—or, for that matter, upon the question of the time involved at all, but upon the relation of creation to a Creator, the Logos of later days or Word of God, Who by His creative energy gave form to finite things; and upon its relation to a law of development whose results became apparent in a progressive cosmic order. Not to reveal nature or teach science, but spiritual truth, was that sacred "primer" given, and if it affirms, as Haeckel freely declares, the modus creandi to have been progressive, and the principle of separation or "differentiation of the originally simple matter" to have been present, science finds in that nothing to contradict. Recent Christian thought has more and more shown the compatibility of the theory of evolution with the doctrine of creation, as it has realised, in virtue of an inherent necessity of thought, the dependence of the finite world alike for its existence and its evolution on the creative

energies of Deity. The Hebrew cosmogony has been in our own time better recognised as lying on another plane than that of science, of which it was not designed to form a prophetic anticipation: it depicts the world, contrary to the notions of antiquity, as not self-originated, but related— n of the Genesis proem-to God as its supramundane Author, in Whose absolute freedom the world became. The way in which the view, formerly held by Christian theology, of the divine method of working has now become modified may be well inferred from the words of a French writer, who has lately1 said: "S'il est un résultat incontestable de toutes les études géologiques poursuivies jusqu'à ce jour, c'est que la nature n'est pas sortie de la main du Créateur, comme Minerve du cerveau de Jupiter. Telle que nous l'admirons aujourd'hui, elle est le dernier terme d'un long travail de transformation;" and again, "Ce résultat a une portée philosophique qu'on ne saurait exagérer. Il ne tend à rien moins qu'à modifier profondément l'idée que les théologiens se sont faite de l'activité créatrice de Dieu."

1 Revue Chrétienne, 1889, p. 321 et seq.

The pre-eminence of man, as seen alike in his being, as creation's head and final form or terminal fact, the culmination of nature's mechanical forces and vital processes, and in his uniqueness among created beings as related to God in Whose likeness he was made, has been recently set forth in clear and discriminating ways that must prove gain to theology; and the reality of the moral and spiritual nature of man, as a free self-conscious personality made in the divine image, whensoever and howsoever he came to be what he is, has been enforced as that which it is of essential importance to maintain. Science has made the creative process a sublimer thing to theology since geology gave its conceptions of progressive divine working through æons vast and cycles successive: physical science, in promulgating its doctrines of the conservation of energy and the correlation of forces, has given Christian thought a firmer grasp of creative agency, and a more distinct notion of the imperishable unity of the causal energy at work in nature, whose endless forces are but variant forms of the omnipresent divine energy. Not the sublimity of the creative process alone, but

also the sympathetic connection of creation with man, we see now more truly perceived and felt— its connection of dependence on man, crown of the cosmos, alike in his fall and his restoration. The influence of modern geology, chemistry, molecular physics, biology, and psychology, has been to make arbitrary and mechanical relations between God and the world—no longer a fixed mechanism, but a thing of constant motion—more and more impossible, and to make thought rest in God as the inherent energy of all things, in other words, in the originative and immanent energy grounded in the transcendent will of God, all which we take to be a serviceable recall to thought from unrelieved abstract transcendence to its completion-not its replacement or substitution in the immanence of God.

A deeper treatment of anthropological questions has been strikingly apparent in the Christian theology of late years. Christian thought has, in recent times, passed, in its view of man as immeasurably superior to nature, beyond those influences which, flowing from the deistic rationalism of last century, with its deification of man, whom we see in the current presentations of the

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