Long before Darwin the creation legend had been recognised as such.  The astronomy of the seventeenth century had removed the earth from its central position.  The geology of the eighteenth had shown how long must have been the ages of the laying down of the earth’s strata.  The question of the descent of man, however, brought home the significance of evolution for religion more forcibly than any other aspect of the debate had done.  There were scientific men of distinction who were not convinced of the truth of the evolutionary hypothesis.  To most Christian men the theory seemed to leave no unique distinction or spiritual quality for man.  It seemed to render impossible faith in the Scriptures as revelation.  To many it seemed that the whole issue as between a spiritual and a purely materialistic view of the universe was involved.  Particularly was this true of the English-speaking peoples.

One other factor in the transformation of the Christian view needs to be dwelt upon.  It is less theoretical than those upon which we have dwelt.  It is the influence of socialism, taking that word in its largest sense.  An industrial civilisation has developed both the good and the evil of individualism in incredible degree.  The unity of society which the feudal system and the Church gave to Europe in the Middle Age had been destroyed.  The individualism and democracy which were essential to Protestantism notoriously aided the civil and social revolution, but the centrifugal forces were too great.  Initiative has been wonderful, but cohesion is lacking.  Democracy is yet far from being realised.  The civil liberations which were the great crises of the western world from 1640 to 1830 appear now to many as deprived of their fruit.  Governments undertake on behalf of subjects that which formerly no government would have dreamed of doing.  The demand is that the Church, too, become a factor in the furtherance of the outward and present welfare of mankind.  If that meant the call to love and charity it would be an old refrain.  That is exactly what it does not mean.  It means the attack upon evils which make charity necessary.  It means the taking up into the idealisation of religion the endeavour to redress all wrongs, to do away with all evils, to confer all goods, to create a new world and not, as heretofore, mainly at least, a new soul in the midst of the old world.  No one can deny either the magnitude of the evils which it is sought to remedy, or the greatness of the goal which is thus set before religion.  The volume of religious and Christian literature devoted to these social questions is immense.  It is revolutionary in its effect.  For, after all, the very gist of religion has been held to be that it deals primarily with the inner life and the transcendent world.  That it has dealt with the problem of the inner life and transcendent world in such a manner as to retard, or even only not to further, the other aspects of man’s life is indeed a