New England pulpit.

The other reason for our relative immunity from humanistic influence
is accidental and complementary merely. It is the mere fact of our
physical isolation, which, until the last seventy-five years, quite
largely shut off thinkers here from continental and English currents
of thought and contributed to the brilliant, if sterile, provincialism
of the New England theology.

It is, therefore, to the second set of media, which may be generally
characterized as scientific and practical, that we now turn. These are
the forces which apparently are most affecting Christian preaching
at this moment. But it is important to remember that a large part
of their influence is to be traced to the philosophic and ethical
tendencies of the earlier humanistic movement which had set the scene
for them, to which they are so sympathetic that we may assert that
it is in them that their practical interests are grounded and by them
that their scientific methods are reinforced. I divide this second
group of media, for clearness, under three heads.

First comes the rise of the natural sciences. In 1859, Darwin
published the _Origin of Species_ and gave to the world the
evolutionary hypothesis, foreshadowed by Goethe and other
eighteenth-century thinkers, simultaneously formulated by Wallace
and himself. Here is a theory, open to objections certainly, not yet
conclusively demonstrated, but the most probable one which we yet
possess, as to the method of the appearance and the continuance of
life upon the planet. It conceives of creation as an unimaginably
long and intricate development from the inorganic to the organic, from
simple to complex forms of life. Like Kantianism and the humanistic