We have already said that evolution does not differ essentially from other laws of Nature in its bearing on religious belief. It only reiterates and enforces with additional emphasis what Science, in all its departments, has been saying all along. The difficulties in the way of certain traditional views have pressed with ever increasing force upon the thoughtful mind ever since the birth of modern science. All along, an issue has been gathering, but put off from time to time by compromise, until now, at last, the issue is forced upon us and compromise is exhausted. The issue (let us look it squarely in the face) is: Either God is far more closely related with Nature, and operates it in a more direct way than we have recently been accustomed to think, or else (mark the alternative) Nature operates itself and needs no God at all. There is no middle ground tenable. Let us trace rapidly the growth of this issue. The old idea and the most natural to the religious mind was the direct agency of God in every event and phenomenon of Nature. This view is nobly expressed in the noblest literature in the world--in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures: “He looketh on the earth and it trembleth. He toucheth the hills and they smoke.” “He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth his rain on the just and on the unjust.” But now comes Science and explains all these phenomena by natural laws and resident forces, and we all accept her explanation. Thus, one by one the phenomena of Nature are explained by the operation of resident forces according to natural laws, until the whole course of Nature, as we now know it, has been, or will be, or conceivably may be, thus explained. Thus has gradually grown up, without our confessing it, a kind of scientific polytheism--one great Jehovah, perhaps, but with many agents or sub-gods, each independent, efficient, and doing all the real work in his own domain. The names of these, our gods, are gravity, light, heat, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, etc., and we are practically saying: “These be your gods, O Israel, which brought you out of the land of Egyptian darkness and ignorance. These be the only gods ye need fear, and serve, and study the ways of.”