BOOKS.
MR. AUBREY MOORE'S ESSAYS.* THESE are very able and interesting essays by one of the ablest of our clergymen. Mr. Aubrey Moore goes farther in his accept- ance of the doctrine of evolution than we should have thought it
quite safe to go at the present time. That the external en- vironment greatly modifies the physical characteristics of the creatures submitted to it, tending to extinguish some of them and to intensify others, is, we suppose, matter of fact. But that any one species has ever been thrown off in this way from the common stock to which it owed its origin, and
separated by influences of this kind from another in which it was originally merged, so as to become specifically distinct, is, we suppose, as yet unverified, a matter at most of reason- able belief, not a matter of scientific evidence. That being so, we should regard Mr. Aubrey Moore's confidence in the doc- trine of evolution as one explaining the genesis of species, as a confidence in excess of the only grounds on which it can be based, though so far as any scientific theory of the origin of species deserves credence at all, this is probably the only one that claims reasonable men's confidence with any show of plausibility. But the grounds of the argu- ment are very ably stated by Mr. Moore in more than one place in this volume, and as tersely as possible in the last of these essays :-
"(a.) Nothing has brought out the difficulty of the special creation' theory more strongly than the modern science of com- parative embryology. It has added enormously to our knowledge of the existence of (apart from its suggested explanation of) • Science and the Faith Essays on Apologetic Subjects. By Aubrey L. Moore, M.A., Honorary Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, Examining Chaplain to the Lord Bishop of Oxford, Tutor of Keble and Magdalen Colleges. London : Regan Paul, Trench, and Co. rudimentary organs, and rudimentary organs have always been a difficulty in the way of the special creation' hypothesis. Take the case of the whale. As Professor Flower pointed out at the Reading Church Congress, it possesses in the embryo state a complete set of teeth, together with rudimentary hind legs, furnished with bones, joints, and muscles, of which there is no trace externally. Yet, before birth, the teeth disappear, and the vestigial legs remain through life concealed within the body. On the theory that the whale is a descendant of a land animal, which used both legs and teeth, they are intelligible as survivals in a creature to which they are apparently useless. But that God should have created these structures in a new being, which had no organic relation with other created forms of life, seems almost inconceivable. We can neither believe that they were created ' for mere sport or variety,' nor that they are Divine mockeries,' nor as an ingenious but anthropomorphic writer in the Spectator suggested, in a review of the Origin of Species,' that God economically kept to the old plan, though its details had ceased to have either appropriateness or use. The difficulties are even stronger in the case of man, and the now well-known facts of his embryonic life. How is it possible, in the face of these, to maintain that we have in man a creation in- dependent of the rest of God's creative work ? Of course, if the theory of 'special creation' existed either in the Bible or in Christian antiquity, we might bravely try and do battle for it. But it came to us some two centuries ago from the side of science, with the imprimatur of a Puritan poet. And, though scientific men are now glad to palm off upon theologians their own mistakes, religion is not bound to wear, still less to be proud of, the cast-off clothes of physical science. (b.) On the other hand, and again apart from the scientific evidence in favour of evolution, as a theory it is infinitely more Christian than the theory of special creation.' For it implies the immanence of God in nature and the omni- presence of His creative power. Those who opposed the doctrine of evolution in defence of a continued intervention ' of God, seem to have failed to notice that a theory of occasional intervention implies as its correlative a theory of ordinary absence. And this fitted in well with the deism of the last century. For deism, even when it struggled to be orthodox, constantly spoke of God as we might speak of an absentee landlord, who cares nothing for his property so long as he gets his rent. Yet anything more opposed to the language of the Bible and the Fathers can hardly be imagined. With S. Athanasius, the immanence of the divine Logos is the explanation of the adaptations and unity of nature, as the fact that man is li.tryucds is the explanation of the truth that man is made in the image of God. Cataclysmal geology and special creation are the scientific analogue of Deism. Order, development, law, are the analogue of the Christian view of God."
The argument is stated almost equally well in the address to the Reading Congress given in the appendix, though we take exception in that address to those grandiose terms " archi- biosis "and " archigony," which are very hard mouthfuls indeed for ordinary human beings, and hard mouthfuls which are not really demanded by the necessities of things, since the phrases " the origin of life " or " the origination of life " are not much more prodigal of letters than these big words, and are much less imposing and alarming. But in his defence of evolution, Mr. Moore hardly gives any space to the consideration of the two difficulties which do, we think, weigh most with theologians against it, —the one that, according to the Scriptural teaching, man is a being who has lost caste, instead of having gained it, since the time of his appearance on the earth, while the doctrine of evolution seems to require that, in the main at least, his life should have been progressive ; the other that, while the doctrine of evolution teaches that the argument from design holds good in relation to the general purposes with which tribes and classes of beings arc created, it does not hold good for verifying the purpose of Providence in the creation of individual life, whereas the religious belief in Providence is effectual only so far as it brings home to man that God has a special purpose in the guidance of every individual life, and in the shaping of every individual destiny. So far as evolution teaches that advance is the general law of life, it teaches something apparently at issue with the doctrine that sin was the first great event which modified man's destiny, and that this modified it for the worse. So far as evolution teaches that the purpose of a great deal that we find in us now, was exhausted long ago in ancestors who have transmitted to us mere vestiges of what that purpose was, beings who perished long ago, or exists as a mere germ which will only find its explanation when it is developed in beings of centuries to come, it teaches what tends to make us regard God as rather caring for types and the cor- relations between types, than for individuals and the relations between individuals. We think that both difficulties required more discussion than Mr. Aubrey Moore has given them. On the second difficulty, which is a very real one, considering the enormous importance attaching to the doctrine of God's in- dividual love and care for every soul of man, Mr. Moore says nothing at all. Yet surely the substitution of the assertion of a divine design in the moulding of types, for the assertion
of a divine design in the moulding of every individual organism, does tend at least to undermine the belief in God's individual Providence in relation even to the life of the soul ? May it not be fairly supposed that if the purpose of God is shown rather in working out the laws of organised being in general, than in working out the bodily constitution of organised beings in particular, it is reasonable to suppose that it will be shown rather in working out the various types of intellect and conscience of which different races are susceptible, than in working out the in- tellectual gifts and obligations of each individual man? And if that be once granted, the very keystone of Christian theology is broken down. On the former point, the apparent dis- crepancy between the doctrine of steady evolutional advance and the Scriptural doctrine of man's fall from holiness, and the transmission of the tendency caused by that fall to his posterity, Mr. Moore only says :-
" Then, it may be asked, How about the Fall ? Is that an allegory, or a metaphorical name for a step forward in evolution ? ' We answer briefly :—The Fall implies a change, and a change for the worse, in the relation of man as a living soul' to his Creator —God. Positive science—and Darwinism is in every way bound by the limits of positive science—will neither help nor hinder us in discussing the relation between two terms, both of which are outside its range."
Surely that is rather a deliberate evasion of the argument from analogy. Mr. Moore has justly made much of the analogy between the doctrine of evolution in physical nature,
and the doctrine of the immanence of God in creation. He ought to attach more importance to the contrast between the evolution of the physical side of Nature, from good to better and from better to best, and the apparent degeneration of man's moral nature from a type which responded perfectly to the divine initiative, to one which refuses such a response. It may be said that the sphere of moral freedom is so unique that when it is reached we may expect it to exhibit deviations from the analogy of Nature as studied in a sphere which contains no freedom ; but how far is moral degeneration found to be consistent with intellectual and physical ad- vance P This, we think, at least ought to have been discussed in the context of Mr. Aubrey Moore's essays. In the essay on Mr. Cotter Morison's Service of Man, Mr. Aubrey Moore seems to us to be altogether at his best. Nothing can be more delicate than his criticism upon the eloquent Positivist's con- fusion between theory and fact,—the very point on which a Positivist might be expected to be free from confusion :—
" Mr. Morison singles out S. Louis, Sir Thomas More, and Pascal, in former days, as types of Christian saintliness, and in quite recent times, Sister Agnes Jones, Mother Margaret Hallaban, and Sister Dora, and to these last three and their work he gives no grudging testimony := I will vie with any one,' he says, in celebrating the unselfish devotion, the self-sacrifice, the warm love and sympathy which they all showed in assuaging human suffering, bodily or mental. I cannot read their lives without tears, and the admiration I feel for them may be truly called passionate' (p. 232). Here we seem to have found three suffi- ciently remarkable lives in which Christianity and morality were connected as cause and effect. Nor does Mr. Morison dream of denying that those noble women lived their lives in the faith of Christianity. But just as in the last chapter Christianity is credited with all the vices it failed to overcome, so here it is asserted, without a shadow of proof, that these women would have been what they were, if they had not been Christians. A hard, sarcastic Scotchman,' we are told, who was a professed unbeliever, remarked of Dora, whose patient he had been, " She's a noble woman, but she'd have been that without her Christianity." ' On which Mr. Morison remarks : That is just the simple fact of the matter.' We are inclined to suggest that, so far from it being matter of fact at all, it is a dogmatic statement as to what might have been under conditions which cannot now possibly be realised. The matter of fact is that these good women lived and died in the service of man inspired by that very faith which is supposed to make people immoral ; the theory is that without that faith they would have done the same. Mr. Morison ought not, however, to confuse theory with fact, especially a theory which, as incapable of proof or disproof, is excluded from the domain of science. And when he proceeds to ask, If the saintliness of these holy women depended upon their creed, why do not the thousands and millions who hold the same creed exhibit a like saintliness ? ' he seems to us to be guilty of another logical blunder."
There is an interesting essay on Dr. Martineau's Study of Religion, though Mr. Moore seems to us to exaggerate greatly Dr. Martinean's hostility to Darwinism. And whence
did he derive his odd notion that Dr. Martineau was "trained in Positivism " (p. 139) ? Dr. Martineau was trained in Priestley's Unitarianism and Necessarianism,—what Mr. Aubrey Moore calls " Deism,"—not in Positivism, which, indeed, dates from a later origin than the period of Dr. Martineau's training. Nor should we have thought that a Positivist training was at all likely to result in that " un- swerving fidelity to experience and steady refusal to sacrifice fact to theory either in morals or religion " which Mr. Moore ascribes to him. Does not Comte's most remarkable generali- sation, the law of the three stages,—of the collapse of theology before metaphysics, and of metaphysics before positive law,— give us the best possible evidence that Positivist training is no security against the sacrifice of fact to theory ? But even when we find Mr. Aubrey Moore least satisfactory, his essays seem to us full of ability and candour, and of largeness of speculative grasp.
Previous page
