With all the problems which evolution has set for religious thought, it should be noticed that it has distinctly relieved the pressure of one difficulty which has been felt, though now much less acutely than formerly, since the time of Copernicus. In the words of Aubrey De Vere: This sphere is not God's ocean, but one drop Showered from its spray. Came God from heaven for that? Life, and life upon the earth, is the centre of attention in the thought of the day. With the physicist who sees the promise and potency of all terrestrial life in the primitive star-dust, with the biologist who speaks of the fitness of the environment to sustain life, or with the philosopher who sees in the vital impulse the most important thing in the history of the universe, the viewpoint is necessarily biocentric. Yet it has been pointed out that the sum of organized matter "is but an atom in the mass of the solar system, it occupies but a moment in its duration; it has hardly a place in space; it is but a temporary film on one of the smaller planets. It can exist only in a very small part of the scale of temperatures through which the spheres pass from their first to their last state. Set against the visible universe it is as near to nothing as we can well conceive anything to be."[53] A distinguished evolutionist has developed an argument to prove that the earth alone in the solar system or elsewhere fulfills the conditions of the existence of any high form of life.[54] It is not necessary to estimate the value of Wallace's argument in order to emphasize, from an evolutionary point of view, the importance of life and of man in the universe. If the standpoint of science to-day is frankly biocentric, in spite of the insignificant bulk of organized matter, religious thought need not be accused of provincialism because it is anthropocentric in its interest. 53: N. S. Shaler: "The Individual," 1910, p. 103. 54: A. R. Wallace: "Man's Place in the Universe." In studying a little more closely the religious bearings of evolution, it will be convenient to notice, I. The Method of Evolution, or the biological discussion; II. The Meaning of Evolution, or the philosophical discussion; and III. Theism and Evolution, or the more directly religious aspects of the theory. I. THE METHOD OF EVOLUTION