CHAPTER XI - EVOLUTION AND RELIGION

Summary

IN the life and teaching of Jesus Christ the ethical ideal is subservient to a further end. With Him the first and also the last is God. For Him God is in the world, and everything reveals God. “Behold the birds of the air, that they sow not, nor reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them.… Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” It is God who clothes the grass of the field with its incomparable beauty. A Divine power so extensive that nothing can exist apart from it, a Divine care so minute that not even a sparrow can fall to the ground without “your Father,” a Divine power from which all other power is derived, and without the exertion of which no power could exist,—such is the vision which Jesus saw; and which of us shall say that His vision was either wrong or inadequate? For Jesus, neither the fowls of the heaven, nor the lilies of the field, nor the grass which grows on the mountains, have any being, fitness, or beauty apart from God. They, after their kind, and in their measure, are for God, live and move and have their being in God.