VII.--Now I have endeavoured to face and meet the points which are urged in the name of science against the Christian doctrine of the Fall. I have endeavoured to point out that what is essential to Christianity is to believe in the reality of moral freedom, and the consequent reality of sin, as something which need not have been in the individual, or in the race considered as a unity. This is all that Christianity is really pledged to maintain. In maintaining this we are maintaining what is absolutely essential to the moral well-being of the race, and, moreover, what has the deepest roots in man's moral experience and in the teaching of Christ. In holding this we hold the doctrine of the Fall, a doctrine, that is, that man's condition has been throughout a parody of the divine intention, owing to the fact of sin tainting and spoiling his development from the root. But Christianity is not in any kind of way pledged against the doctrine of development, only against the doctrine which no reasonable science can hold, that the actual development of man has been the best or only possible one. Nor, I have urged, can it be reasonably said that the Christian doctrine of sin and of the Fall is bound up with one particular interpretation of Genesis iii. All, then, that we must admit in the way of collision between Christianity and science is, on the one hand, that Christianity is not intended to teach men science, and that when there is any great advance in human knowledge it takes a little while for Christianity to extricate itself from the meshes of the language and ideas belonging to one stage of scientific knowledge, and to assimilate the terms and ideas of the new. But, on the other hand, there is perennial and necessary warfare between Christianity and materialistic science, or a science which denies the reality of moral freedom. And as to Christianity giving up what is proper to its own ground--its teaching about {235} freedom and sin and the Fall, and God's purpose for man, and the love shown in his redemption--to give up this is to give up what is the best and deepest motive of human progress, and what is most surely certificated by the witness of Christ and the spiritual experience of Christendom. Indeed all schemes of human improvement are shallow and inadequate, which do not deal with man as what, in fact, he has been proved to be, a sinful, that is a fallen, being, needing not only education but redemption.