or falls with the so-called "Pauline idea of the garden of Eden." We have said above that the deduction of man's immortality from the doctrine of evolution is legitimate, for man must continue to evolve into something higher if the doctrine of evolution be true, for his development can only be in the direction of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual. But it does not necessarily follow that evolution will bring about the immortality of the individual. Evolution deals with species. A new immortal species of the genus Homo it might produce, but what will become of the antecedent species of this genus? It strikes the writer that the doctrine of the transmigration of souls will be necessary in order to make out a case for man with this congeries of hypotheses. No, we reject as utterly untenable this doctrine of natural selection as applied to man, and accept the marvelously majestic story of creation contained in the first and second chapters of Genesis. It is beset by far fewer difficulties, philosophic, scientific, moral, and spiritual. On the other hand, we rejoice in the attempt at reconciliation, because of the great fundamental truth conceded therein. A supreme intelligent First Cause is back of cosmic processes, and if he is there, man's immortality is provided for, and man's religious convictions, beliefs, and needs demand God revealed in Christ. This because he is infinite in goodness. We would not have it inferred, however, that we believe in the doctrine of evolution as presented by naturalism, as applicable to any period in the history of the cosmos. The physical forces and matter together cannot adequately account to reason for any one particular stage in the development of the universe. Naturalism is rigidly fatalistic. Physical forces working in and through matter can work out but certain definite results, and without alternativity. There is nothing like contingency of any sort in such a universe. Alternativity of result implies the interposition of an external power, which is supernatural. Contingency implies chance. Law can never admit chance. Naturalism is logically compelled to say there is not a leaf that has fallen

to the ground but its position originally on the bough that bore it and its position on the ground at every moment of time was absolutely determined by law, and could all the natural causes connected with its production from primordial chaos down to the last flutter in the wind be known its position could with absolute certainty be designated. Contingency can play no part in a universe of law and order; it therefore can have no place in evolution. Evolution reckons on infinitesimal variations in species, and these preserved and augmented resulted in long ages in the development of new species. These variations were fixed by law. There could not be any contingency or chance in the matter. If the evolutionist is reckoning on accidental variations he is reckoning against law. He must either dismiss law or dismiss contingency.

Let us now for a moment consider where this leads us in our conception of the universe. We start with a primitive fire-mist, and we find in it the promise and potency of the cosmos in all the future. Its material, its laws, its forces contain all that is or will be. We will take our own solar system as a sample of what evolution demands. From the central nebulous globe are thrown off the globes that make the planets and their satellites. These are solidified by the radiation of heat out through the spaces. After a long period this earth of ours is fitted for the evolution of the lowest forms of life, and the Spencerian process of "differentiations and integrations" begins and works out the endless diversity of living things with which this world is peopled. The capital stock of this process are certain minute variations that appeared from time to time, which were maintained because fitted to survive. But whence the variations? What law produced them? Was it law or chance? We half fancy that these are questions the evolutionist has slurred over. But it is apparent at once that it can never be admitted that these variations are the product of chance, but on the contrary were rigidly determined by law. And if man is to be placed in this chain of naturalistic development,

then it follows that every page of human history was written in inexorable fate, and man's belief that he is a free moral agent is a monumental deception. But we may go several steps farther with this materialist's creed. The secular cooling of the earth by the radiation of its heat out into space points inevitably to the time when this earth shall be a cold lifeless ball, as devoid of life as is its satellite, as this time draws on in the coming ages living forms will begin to disintegrate to conform to their environment. While the survival of the fittest may still hold it will be the principle of devolution that obtains. This law of the dissipation of energy, which is as well established as that of the correlation of forces, points to a time when the universe shall reach stable equilibrium—an exact balance of all its forces. What power will be present to upset the equilibrium and start the forces into operation again on a new process of evolution? Whatever that power, it will be supernatural. It will be the operation of omnipotent will. That power

which is demanded at the end of this cycle of the cosmos and at the beginning of another was also demanded at the beginning of this cycle. In other words, the evolution of the universe started by the interposition of an Omnipotent Will above and outside of primeval chaos. It also follows that what are called the laws of nature are simply the methods of his working. Every minute variation in the forms of life which gave birth to a development of higher orders of living things was ordained by him. Now the only question that remains is a question as to the when of the divine working at the beginning, or all along through the entire procWhat makes one more natural, scientific, rational, than the other? Nothing. It is just as rational to conceive God as imminent in every stage of creation's processes as to conceive of him as present at the beginning of an æon. But divine interposition always and everywhere is the supernatural coming down upon the natural. This it must be or pantheism is the logical result. And pantheism is fatalism, and all reasoning is at an end.

esses.

So we reach this conclusion that divine interposition all along through the cosmic processes is the only rational explanation of the universe, and the only view that is consistent throughout. Again, if man is a free moral agent as he believes himself to be, he brings about results that are not provided for by any process of evolution. He modifies nature contrary to the processes of evolution. If this be true then naturalistic evolution has evolved that which sets aside its laws, and militates against its working. Not only so, if God is the author of these laws in the beginning, then this being of his creation is outside the chain of evolution, and an order of divine interposition is required for his government. And here enters, ex necessitate rei, the supernatural and miraculous. We conclude, therefore, that the only rational and consistent evolution is the Bible evolution, with its special creation of man in the divine image. The naturalistic theory is beset by mountainous difficulties and lands our thought in a maze of metaphysical absurdities.

F.M.K. Stuart

ART. III.-JOB AND FAUST.

IN these days when all that is necessary to give one a reputation for being "literary" is that he should ask everybody he meets, "Have you read the latest?" and when that "latest" invariably is either a swashbucklering adventure tale, wherein the gifted author (a gentle maiden scarce out of her teens) seems to be trying chiefly to let no page be published that is not reeking with gore; or else a dialect story containing profound philosophy of life packed away in nuggets of homely speech, but whose chief reason for meriting our attention appears to be the fact that its sales "aggregate a half million copies," one hesitates and feels, almost ashamed to turn to a book where little blood is spilled save that which may be wrung from human hearts tense with the agony of the trials of life, especially if that book has the misfortune to be called a classic instead of "the latest." In the company that assembles about the pages of this magazine, however, one may do bold things-even a thing so daring as to suggest a comparison of two great dramas of the soul, "Job" and "Faust." For there is a superficial resemblance between parts of these two books that invites a comparison of their inward meaning. The stage machinery of the first part of "Faust" Goethe admits that he imitated from the ancient Hebrew work. In each poem the Satan-the Spirit of Denial-appears before the throne of God, and, expressing doubt as to the real goodness of a man who has been looked upon as an illustrious servant of the Most High, obtains leave to try to win him away from that allegiance. Here is the ground for our study. In each poem we have presented to us a man who is to be subjected by God's permission to peculiarly trying tests. The life of the soul of typical man in his experience of the ills of the world-whether of adversity or of temptation-is what interests us. What he "is, becomes, achieves" holds us because he stands for us. To be sure, there are other problems in these poems which lie