“Lead us, Evolution, lead usUp the future's endless stair;Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.For stagnation is despair:Groping, guessing, yet progressing,Lead us nobody knows where.Wrong or justice, joy or sorrow,In the present what are theywhile there's always jam-tomorrow,While we tread the onward way?Never knowing where we're going,We can never go astray.To whatever variationOur posterity may turnHairy, squashy, or crustacean,Bulbous-eyed or square of stern,Tusked or toothless, mild or ruthless,Towards that unknown god we yearn.Ask not if it's god or devil,Brethren, lest your words implyStatic norms of good and evil(As in Plato) throned on high;Such scholastic, inelastic,Abstract yardsticks we deny.Far too long have sages vainlyGlossed great Nature's simple text;He who runs can read it plainly,'Goodness = what comes next.'By evolving, Life is solvingAll the questions we perplexed.Oh then! Value means survival-Value. If our progenySpreads and spawns and licks each rival,That will prove its deity(Far from pleasant, by our present,Standards, though it may well be).”

“If God is wiser that we His judgement must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil.”

“Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good - above all, that we are better than someone else - I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil.”

“I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know. God may call any one of us to respond to some far away problem or support those who have been so called. But we are finite and he will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.”

“Now we cannot...discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, "You must do this. I can't.”

“The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with out friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”

“Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him.”