A discussion of the present relations between science and the Christian Faith must be very largely a discussion of the theory of evolution. Our age has been called evolution-mad; we can scarcely speak or even think except in biological terms and under biological categories. The evolution theory has influenced every department of thought and even the science of thought itself, and it is often assumed that everything pre-Darwinian must be thrown to the intellectual scrap-heap. Half a century ago the time was ripe for a new generalization in science which should include the organic world. Newton had extended the reign of mechanism in space, and Lyell, by substituting the uniformitarian for the catastrophic theory of the formation of the earth's crust, had effected the same extension in time. Men's minds had become familiar with the thought of immense reaches of space and of vast periods of time, and with the idea in both spheres of the reign of natural law instead of immediate divine intervention. The Darwinian hypothesis of Natural Selection came as the culmination of this movement of a progressive substitution of a natural for a supernatural explanation of things. The motions of planets and heavenly bodies, the formation of the strata of the earth's crust, and now the kingdom of organic life were brought within the domain of natural and general law. It is not necessary to describe in detail the ferment in religious thought which followed the publication of the "Origin of Species," 1859; but we may notice briefly the extreme inferences which were drawn unfavourable to religion, and then the inevitable reaction. On the one hand there were loud claims at first that the death-knell of religion had been sounded. A cause other than creation had been discovered for the origin of species and by analogy for other origins formerly assigned to the Creator. Chance, not only blind but apparently cruel, was enthroned in the place of design in the production of the various forms of life. The higher was evolved from the lower, but in a way that gave to the higher the quality of the lower. Man was no longer the child of God, not even the prodigal child. He was the progeny of the brute and shared his destiny. The obligation to be moral, or even decent, had no higher sanction than the fierce struggle for existence. Theism was derived from animal-or ancestor-worship, and had no higher authority or credibility. Man, no longer made in the divine image, could lay no claim to a divine inheritance; not fallen, but rising out of his brute inheritance, he had no need for the divine mercy.