has been given to Christianity to disclose the lines of a further
Evolution. And if Science also professes to offer a further Evolution,
not the most sanguine evolutionist will venture to contrast it, either
as regards the dignity of its methods, the magnificence of its aims, or
the certainty of its hopes, with the prospects of the Spiritual Kingdom.
That Science has a prospect of some sort to hold out to man, is not
denied. But its limits are already marked. Mr. Herbert Spencer, after
investigating its possibilities fully, tells us, "Evolution has an
impassable limit."[99] It is the distinct claim of the Third Kingdom
that this limit is not final. Christianity opens a way to a further
development--a development apart from which the magnificent past of
Nature has been in vain, and without which Organic Evolution, in spite
of the elaborateness of its processes and the vastness of its
achievements, is simply a stupendous _cul de sac_. Far as nature carries
on the task, vast as is the distance between the atom and the man, she
has to lay down her tools when the work is just begun. Man, her most
rich and finished product, marvelous in his complexity, all but Divine
in sensibility, is to the Third Kingdom not even a shapeless embryo. The
old chain of processes must begin again on the higher plane if there is
to be a further Evolution. The highest organism of the Second
Kingdom--simple, immobile, dead as the inorganic crystal, toward the
sphere above--must be vitalized afresh. Then from a mass of all but
homogeneous "protoplasm" the organism must pass through all the stages
of differentiation and integration, growing in perfectness and beauty
under the unfolding of the higher Evolution, until it reaches the
Infinite Complexity, the Infinite Sensibility, God. So the spiritual
carries on the marvelous process to which all lower Nature ministers,
and perfects it when the ministry of lower Nature fails.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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