Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III THEISTIC INFERENCES FROM MAN'S PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE Man the climax and crown of evolution — what then? What inferences may we draw from man's place in the universe regarding the Great Being who is beneath and within the creative process, from its commencement to its consummation? That is the theme which is to occupy our attention in the present lecture. Our appeal, you observe, is to the end of the process. Why, it may be asked, restrict ourselves to the end; why not roam over the whole process in quest of critical points at which the Creator's hand may be directly apparent? Some theistic apologists have in fact done this, as if under an impression that while God may be in the usual, He is far more certainly to be found in the unusual, where the evolutionary process passes into some new phase and makes a remarkable new departure. Before going on to unfold the argument based on man's position, it may help us to appreciate its comparative value if we first give some account of the leading attempts to plant the foot of faith on what seem crises in the history of world-genesis. Three such crises have received prominent attention from apologists. 1. Some have sought to find room and need for special Divine activity at the very beginning of the evolutionary process. The contention is that the initial condition, just before evolution commences, is such that no commencement is possible without some action ab extra. The starting-point is conceived to be ' a vast diffusion of ultimate units of matter, each like the other hi every respect, each subject to equal pressure and tension.'1 How in such a state of things is differentiation to begin? No other way is conceivable, it is argued, than by the power of God. No great exertion of that power may be necessary. No g...