C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Evolution
Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.
The expression, often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.
The tree of human history, as it has grown from age to age, has been but the unfolding of a single germ—but the development of Christ and Him crucified.
Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.
This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called “natural selection, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.”
As ages roll on there is doubtless a progression in human nature. The intellectual comes to rule the physical and the moral claims to subordinate both. It is no longer strength of body that prevails, but strength of mind; while the law of God proclaims itself superior to both.
All true development tends ever to God. Its objective aim is the restoration by the second Adam of the Divine image forfeited by the first; and, incidentally, it transmutes grief into gladness and sighs into songs. But it is always a development in Christ, since it is only “in the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God” that any of our race can come “unto a perfect man.”
God has been always working, evolving, in His quiet power, from the seeming, the real, from the false, the true. Not for nothing blazed the martyr’s fires—not for nothing toiled brave sufferers up successive hills of shame. God’s purpose doth not languish. The torture and the trial of the past have been the stern ploughers in His service who never suspended their husbandry, and who have made long their furrows, into those furrows the imperishable seed hath fallen. The heedless world hath trodden it in; tears and blood have watered it; the patient sun hath warmed and cheered it to its ripening; and it shall be ready soon.