Ladies’ Edinburgh Magazine > Volume 5

Is the Tli£0)'y of Evolution opposed to Christianity ? 59
would in no way touch the theistic idea, the eternal necessity
for a Creator; and second. That it would not, in my view,
in any way affect the fundamental veracity of the Bible
narrative. There is yet another objection which is often
raised, of which I should like to speak. It is said that, on
such a theory, the soul of man would be necessarily but an
improved edition of that of the beasts that perish,—that to
believe it, it would be necessary to discard the idea of man's
moral responsibility, the possibility of a Fall, the need of a
Eedeemer. Weighty objections indeed, if they can be justly
brought against the theory. But can they ? I think not.
To me it does not seem that the mode of man's creation
touches any one of these points. Is there really any greater
difficulty in conceiving of moral responsibility as the attri¬
bute of a creature whose physical being has been a slow
growth from the dust of the earth through a long gradation
of lower stages of being, than of conceiving it as the attribute
of one springing direct from that primordial dust ? But
it is objected, Wliy should man be more responsible than the
ancestors from whom, on this theory, he has risen by almost
imperceptible gradations ? Is not what we call sin necessary
imperfection merely ? We do not say that a sea-jelly sins
because it cannot walk like a man ; why should we say that
a man sins because he cannot live like a God ? Is not this
struggle, of which we are all conscious, between what we call
good and evil, only the necessary antagonism between what
has been and what will be, in a creature sprung from lower
antecedents and going on to higher developments ? If it be
so, what book, let me ask, dwells with such passionate earnest¬
ness as the Bible on this old struggle between the flesh and
the spirit ? But to make this an objection to man's re¬
sponsibility seems to me to spring from a certain confusion of
thought as to the real nature of that responsibility and the
real sphere of its operation. Moral responsibility seems to me
to mean the duty which every creature owes to its Creator,
to live up to the highest laws of its being. The sea-jelly is
not responsible that it cannot walk as a man, because that
is not according to the laws of being impressed upon it by
its Maker; and we cannot conceive of a sea-jelly blaming
itself for such inability, any more than we can conceive of a
man feeling remorse because he cannot fly. Neither does a
man feel remorse because he cannot live as a God, for he
cannot even conceive what it would be so to live ; but he can
conceive what it is to live up to the manhood—the Divine
manhood—which has been stamped upon him by his Creator;
and he is conscious that in so far as he fails to do this he