Up to this point there had been an increase of spirituality in the constructions by which human thought satisfied its need; none the less, the ideas underlying the mode of these constructions had not materially altered. As Voltaire so pungently put it, man had created God in his own image. What remains? there remains to search in the external world, to find there if possible a foundation of fact for the belief drawn from the inner world of mind, to test the conceptions of a supreme being or supereminent power against ever more and more touchstones of reality, until the most sceptical shall acknowledge that the final construction represents, with whatever degree of incompleteness, yet not a mere fragment educed to fill a void, however inevitable, to satisfy a longing, however natural, but the summary and essence of a body of verifiable fact, having an existence independent of the wishes or ideals of mankind. It was the striving after some such certainty that led Matthew Arnold to his famous definition of God as “something, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness.” Dissatisfaction with the assertion that belief in a very special and undemonstrable form of Divinity was necessary as an act of faith has, in a large measure, helped the widespread revulsion against orthodox Christianity. It was the need for some external, ascertainable basis for belief which led such different minds as William James and H. G. Wells to approach religion, and in such diverse ways as in the “Varieties of Religious Experience” and in “God the Invisible King.” It is this same need which is leading the representatives of Christianity to lay ever greater stress upon the reality and pragmatic value of the religious experience, less and less upon dogmas and creeds. It will be my attempt in this brief paper to show how the facts of evolutionary biology provide us, in the shape of a verifiable doctrine of progress, with one of the elements most essential to any such externally-grounded conception of God, to any construction which shall be able to serve as permanent satisfaction of that deepest need whereof we have spoken. Any such construction must take account of many separate parts of reality. In the first place, it must consider those realities inherent in the mind of man: his desire for goodness; the sense of value which all agree is attached to certain experiences of mystics and to certain religious emotions; his ideals and their importance for the conduct of life. But in the second place it must consider those realities which are independent of man and of his mind--the ascertainable body of hard fact, those things which existed before ever he existed, which would exist were he to disappear, with which he must struggle as best he may. Lastly, there is the need for intermediation between the one and the other reality, between the inner _felt_ and the outer _known_.