George Henry Dole

“ To enlightened reason the doctrine that the sun will burn out and the earth freeze, is as pitiable a faith as the most fanciful superstition of the savage. That man's career is ended by death is as impossible as the creation of the earth by itself. That material force could evolve the universe by natural selection is more ludicrous than the healing power of fetiches.
It is the office of revelation to address the higher faculties of intelligence and judgment and to provide spiritual facts and things that rescue from the inevitable conclusion of sensual reasonings. ”

“ Not to know God is not to know anything worth knowing, for the knowledge of God gives all other knowledge its value. Knowledge is permanently useful in the degree that it leads to and reveals God. For how much better is a white man with a gun than an Indian with a bow if his weapons are put only to the same selfish purpose? The superior knowledge of science and art is superior only so far as it opens the understanding to God and to the virtues that are of His Divine Humanity. ”

“ To those who hunger and thirst for the righteousness of its spirit, who were the mere scribes is a matter of idle and worthless curiosity; for the tests of its divinity are in the light, joy, and peace of God's presence in the universe and in the heart, revealed by the humble, reverent, prayerful living of its teachings. No one is competent to question the divinity of the Word until he has found it wanting in its self-imposed proof, "If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine." ”

“ Truth and goodness are the essential nature of God, from whom they originate, together with every idea concerning them. Indeed, if the virtues had not an absolute existence in the Divine Being, they never could have been so much as thought of. The intuition by which we know that we could have no sense of cold if there were not heat, no sense of light if there were not darkness, no sense of joy if there were not sadness, no sense of harmony if there were not discord, equally assures us that we could have no knowledge of even relative virtue if there were not absolute virtue. ”

“ The essential nature of a rock is just as unknowable as God is, yet we have the science of geology. But because the essential nature of a rock is unknown no one of sound mind questions the existence of a rock. The essential nature of land and water is unknowable, but no one doubts the existence of land and sea, or questions the laws of navigation. The essential nature of the earth is unknown, but there is absolute faith in the science of geography. The essential nature of an animal is unknowable, yet no one doubts its existence nor does the fact interfere with the science of zoology. ”

“ If not an entity in existence, how can it govern? We can get no nearer the solution of the controlling agency by shifting it as an undefined thing into the future. If it is the future that rules, "the future" must be defined before we have advanced one whit in wisdom or one whit nearer an explanation.
There is only one sense in which "projected efficiency" has any sane meaning, and that is that the government of the future is the government of Him who inhabits the future, and to whom the future is as the present. ”

“ That society with its marvelous developments, scientific, civil, and spiritual, should have started by the "fortuitous concourse of atoms," is more strange than the creation which it cannot explain. And when we come to the application of the principles of Evolution to social problems, and witness the final conclusions in regard to the origin of right, good, spirituality, conceptions of God, and the like, we are led so far away from the possible, and so deeply into the absurd and profane, that only the most sordid devotee, the shallow, and the credulous can entertain the doctrine. ”

“ If reason controls perception, the man is bound down to the senses and is their servant. If perception leads reason, the senses become the servant, the man is the master, and the way is open for a higher enlightenment. The difference between a false reasoner and a true reasoner is that in the former the senses are above and rule the reason. In the latter intelligence is above and rules the reason.
Unaided by revelation it can but be concluded that all our sciences, "all our art, Plato, Shakespeare, Newton and Raphael, are potential in the fires of the sun." ”

“ In accepting survival of the fittest as a law, it is important to know and define what the "fittest" is. What is it that nature saves? If the fittest survive, such it is her purpose to save, for surely nature's purpose is wrought out as well in securing all her designs as in the exaction of penalties for not fulfilling her laws.
We cannot understand by survival of the fittest merely the fittest to survive in the sense of the fittest to exist in and for self. If this were what it means, development would have stopped long ago. ”

“ But if the cold and cruel struggle for self-existence is the energizing and inmost thing, nature's beauty is false, the song of the stars is a dirge, and the grand anthem of the universe is a rasping chord. ”

“ Let such a factor, a real, spiritual world, be introduced into our reasonings, and surely we have every cause for believing that the development of natural organisms has taken place through adjustment to external realities, and in a similar manner the mind is developed by adjustment to internal realities, which are properly called spiritual.
The intellect is adjusted to knowledge as surely as the fin is to the sea. Understanding bears the same relation to truth as the eye does to light. Love bears the same relation to the spirit as heat does to the body. The will hears as well as the body. ”

“ Yet there has ever been a feeling of dissatisfaction, a sense that Evolution is not all, that it is sadly inadequate. Consequently Evolution has made its way against a reluctance almost universal, and has been accepted, openly by some and tacitly by others, because backed by so formidable an array of apparent fact and contrived reason that no one has been found who could satisfactorily defeat it all along the line and at the same time offer a better solution of phenomena. ”

“ Moral intuition dictates that the human form could not be so perfected and endowed with sublime aspirations simply for disappointment. Since science holds that every animal organ, sense, and faculty, are developed through their relations to something, is it possible for the distinctively human senses and faculties to be developed if they are in relation to nothing? Is it not a violation of every principle of scientific reasoning to assume that human aspirations are developed in relation to non-realities, or to nothing? ”

“ Now if fortune began creation, it has been by luck and chance that each step in the upward development was made; and luck, chance, and fortune are the sum of all intelligence, design, wisdom, love, and life that is or is to come. In which case the essential nature of the creative power and the supreme intelligence is luck, for the first cause must terminate in the last effect. ”

“ The more we learn, the more certain we are that nature is only an effect of which an interior world is the cause.
If science shows that one hair sac is developed into an eye and another into an ear, it does not tell why; and the fact of the development is even as great a mystery as ever. For there is as much mystery in conceiving how and why nature develops an eye from one tissue and an ear from another as there is in imagining similar development from pure protoplasm. There is no intelligence in sound waves or ether vibrations. They can neither hear nor see. ”

“ Revelation shows us that science, art, and human ability are not potential in the sun, but that they and all faculty and power are absolute in the Creator, coming to us from Him and unfolding out of the spiritual sunshine that He sends upon the evil and upon the good. Revelation not only opens a new world of interior causes and realities, but it also discovers human faculties that can cognize them and enter a life of spiritual understandings and blessings through intelligence from Him who is "the light of the world." ”

“ We must not linger in the single isolated struggle for existence, nor must we mistake a long succession of struggles for the interpretation of the cosmic process, but rather search for the motive that works out through the struggle. The mind must comprehend not only individuals, generations, and ages, but also whole periods of time. Then the moral motive, which is the service of man, naturally and spiritually, and thus the will of God, is as surely present and dominant in nature as it is in man or in God's kingdom. ”

“ If we stop to think what words mean, we shall know that external non-realities are nothing, and that adjustments to external non-realities are adjustments to nothing.
The cosmic process regards two things, external realities and internal realities. There is the external reality of the natural world, to which material creation must conform. The eye is adjusted to the ether, the ear to the sound, the lungs to the atmosphere, the fin to the water, the wing to the air. We have no difficulty in acknowledging the reality of the natural world, because it is cognized by the senses set in the body. ”

“ We are told that right and wrong have their origin in human relations, and are developed as new conditions of society make additional demands. If there were only one person on the earth, whatever he desired to do would be right. But as soon as another comes into the field, his equal rights must be respected. As the number increases, land is occupied, food is scarce, and social relations are developed, right and wrong have an increased meaning. Right and wrong, good and evil, are therefore considered as merely relative terms, having no absolute existence. ”

“ We can see in the law a Divine provision for human as well as for general development. It is a merciful law, because it eliminates the unfitted, lessens pain by removing the weak and the sickly, and provides the minimum of suffering. The moral motive in cosmic processes is everywhere present in nature's processes, because there is no law that does not work out a final good and the highest welfare of man, who is the end of creation and for whose service all things are and were created. ”

“ The conspicuous error of Evolution for which it must now pay the penalty is, that it has never acknowledged the very objective term, real or unreal, toward which the cosmic process is moving. But here Evolution has at least been consistent with itself, for how could a theory have an end in view that had its beginning in the "fortuitous concourse of atoms?" The reality of the unseen world offers a rational solution to the whole problem. ”

“ It may be truly said that natural law is as the body of which spiritual law is the soul. The arm moves from a spiritual power in the will; the countenance smiles from a spiritual power. Man loves, thinks, and performs every act from a spiritual power in the soul. Likewise nature, being the body of which the spiritual world is the soul, performs all her operations in minutest particulars and most general aspect from the forces of the spiritual world, which world the Creator fills with life and power from Himself.
Then Mr. Darwin was, in one sense, right in speaking of natural selection ”

“ Science and art are as infinite as God is, yet they are not absolutely unknowable. There is a belief in rock, the earth, the seas, the animal, science and art, because they are objects of the material senses. But there are faculties higher and more trustworthy than the corporeal senses. Intelligence is a mental faculty of seeing, and gives knowledge of surer kind than can vision, or any corporeal sense, for intelligence not only directs the senses, uses them, and corrects sensual impressions, but it sees in its proper light upon its own plane. ”

“ The creation of varying material forms is now substantially ended, but creation continues on the plane of the human mind and is in essence the development of the divine character in man. The Garden of God is now composed of human hearts. Once creative forces were directed to the making of lands, seas, mollusks, fishes, birds, plants, animals. Now it is centered, as preparation has been made, upon the development of justice, reason, judgment, purity, honesty, understanding, righteousness, holiness, spirituality, love—in short, all that we know under the name of the Divine Human. ”

“ We may conclude with logic as sound and certain as is used in any scientific deduction, that every sense, faculty, and hope of the human soul has an objective reality in relation to which it is developed as surely as the wing argues an atmosphere, or the eye an ether. ”

“ Then, according to the same principle, odors formed the sense of smell, flavor the sense of taste, and material objects the sense of feeling. But since taste and feeling are not acted upon except they act, for appetite or desire must precede the act, the conclusion cannot be drawn, and the principle fails; and failing as to one sense it fails as to all. No more potent are light rays to form the eye, or air waves to form the ear without the introduction of another factor. The object of a sense cannot form the sense. Nowhere in all the realms of life did an object form its subject. ”

“ Whatever errors may appear in the letter of the Word, when viewed from a natural, scientific, or historical standpoint, its internal is spirit and life. From the standpoint of its spirit and life it should be determined whether or not the Bible is the source of revelation from God to man to-day. When studied as a book whose purport is to teach history and science, it is natural that one should become agnostic or fall into the sophistry and the consequent apostacy of the pseudo-learning of the higher criticism—a costly fad, but one whose days are already numbered. ”

“ Yet here and there a stalwart nature has risen and dealt the theory a staggering blow, from which it has tried to recover by shifting position or by re-intrenchment.
Nevertheless, Evolution has extended its lines until it is accepted by many among all thinking classes. There are many of the religious who accept it, in one form or another, as the Creator's method of bringing the universe into existence as it is to-day; though it is a little difficult to comprehend how a system of creation that is all-sufficient in itself could be a method employed by any one. ”