The universal physical fact of evolution, which a widely accepted philosophy of our day postulates as a theory of the Divine method of creation, is one which so naturally and simply fits many a puzzling lock, that it is gratefully seized by many who seem to themselves to have been shut out from hope and from the truth.

For myself, while finding no need of changing my idea of the Divine personality because of new light upon His mode of working, I have hailed the Evolutionary philosophy with joy. Some of the applications of its principles to the line of development I have to reject; others, though not proven—and in the present state of scientific knowledge perhaps not even provable—I accept as probable; but the underlying truth, as a Law of Nature (that is, a regular method of the divine action), I accept and use, and thank God for it!

Slowly, and through a whole fifty years, I have been under the influence, first obscurely, imperfectly, of the great doctrine of Evolution. In my earliest preaching I discerned that the kingdom of heaven is a leaven, not only in the individual soul, but in the world; the kingdom is as a grain of mustard-seed; I was accustomed to call my crude notion a seminal theory of the kingdom of God in this world.