Evidence of God; and the Vastness and Goodness of Nature.

"He who thinks that he has exhausted the principle of causation, when he has simply registered the facts, and assigned them to their respective physical cause or causes, reminds the author of a man, instanced by Gassendi, who hearing the clock strike four, and being half-asleep, exclaimed, 'That clock has gone mad: it has struck one o'clock four times over!' The man was awake to the sound, and to the cause, but asleep to the significance of the group.

"The anecdote is very applicable to a certain class of thinkers who conceive that they want no divine idea to account for the works of Nature, just because they have the laws and the facts. There are the organs that conspire to form the organism, the tissues that compose the organs, the cells that compose the tissues; what do you want with design? As who should say: Look at that piano—Do you think it was contrived to subserve the musician's art? Be assured page 61 that that is a superficial and quite popular explanation. Strings, wood, ivory,—these are its anatomical elements, and each of these elements has essential and immanent properties. Thus, the strings have the property of vibration, the wood that of resonance, and so forth. What wonder, then, if the machine should serve for the production of musical sound, since the elements which compose it have the properties necessary to produce that effect!

"If this in truth be the method of physical science, and not a caricature, and, if it rest there, if it do not invoke a natural metaphysic to its aid—(for we all of us think and talk metaphysics oftentimes without knowing it)—why, preferable surely is the indocta ignorantia of Sganarelle, who thus speaks, as M. Janet cites him, to the unbelieving Don Juan: 'I have not studied like you, thank God, and no one could ever boast of having taught me anything; but, with my small sense—with my small judgment—I see things better than books, and understand very well that this world that we see is not a mushroom that has come of itself in a night. I would ask you who has made these trees, these rocks, this earth, and yonder sky above? And whether all that has made itself? Can you see all the inventions of which the human machine is composed, without admiring the way in which it is arranged one part with another? these nerves, bones, veins, arteries, these lungs, this heart, this liver? My reasoning is that there is something wonderful in man, whatever you may say, which all the savants cannot explain.'"

"Dublin Review."

"How many throws of the atomic dice, it may in fairness be asked, does a dashing ultra Darwinian or stick-at-nothing Haeckelite conjecture would be required to produce the instinct of two birds, which enables them to build with safety and neatness, select materials and construct up-fittings exactly suited to the hatching, growth, and comfort of their young ones, and give the needed knowledge to choose out of a thousand substances, without any lesson of experience, the proper kinds of food? Shake the atomic dice as you may, no 'fortuitous concourse of atoms' ever did or could produce the parent cell possessed by flowering-plant and reptile, fish and bird and mammal, and which may now be supposed to exist along the vast ascending scale from the humble Amoeba up to Man."

"Theist."

"Take, for example, the broad facts and beliefs involved in the doctrine of Development, or Evolution as it is more generally termed. There is not a single fact in the entire range of that doctrine which does not bear witness to the workings of a God-like Power in Nature animating, moulding and forming this universe and all its parts—living and non-living—through the operation of well-directed and beautifully harmonised laws. Watch the development of the flower from its bud, and note the wondrous unfolding of com- page 62 plicated sets of organs from the simple structure and tissues of the bud. Day by day there is evolved before us the complex from the simple, the special from the general; and could we trace the hidden working of the forces which direct the sap-streams to the point of development, we might witness hour by hour the evolution of cells and structures in a manner unparalleled save in other departments of living nature. From a simple germ arises not only the flower ministering to our highest sense of enjoyment, but the entire plant adding to the beauty and fulness of this fair earth. Can a spectacle such as this, or such as that witnessed in the development and evolution of the animal from its primitive germ, move us to no thoughts of a power working through system and order?—a spectacle and phenomenon utterly unthinkable if you separate them from the idea of Intelligent Causation. Well may the Laureate tell us that—

"In many a figured leaf enrolls
The total world since life began:"

and well may we ask what ideas exist in the doctrine of Evolution as a whole which run counter to the idea of God's existence, and of His power and laws?"

Dr. Andrew Wilson.

"Turn your thoughts for a few moments to the starry heavens, as nightly disclosed to the astronomer's gaze by those gigantic telescopes and their appliances, which are among the chief wonders of modern inventive skill. In certain portions of the heavens more stars pass across the small visible field of the instrument each minute than you or I have ever distinctly seen with unaided vision, shining over the whole concave surface of the sky. I say nothing of the incalculable distances of each from each, or of each from our earth. Yet modern research has taught us that each of these innumerable lights is a sun, similar in its constitution to our own—nay, often a combination of two suns, each revolving round its companion sun, and each revolving beyond all question after the order of these same Keplerian laws which regulate our own. Moreover, there can be no doubt that close to each of these companion suns there revolves a system of planetary worlds, nestling within the protective influence of the dominant attraction. Further still, and what interests us most, is the fact that our planetary system and our own sun are themselves units in this vast associated group. Yet this incalculable array of associated systems of worlds is not a chaos but a kosmos: a kosmos replete with order and beauty and law. The sublimity of its beauty is familiar to us all, and labour and ingenuity have gradually disclosed some portions of its orderly arrangements.

"And now, not in contrast—still less not in derisive contrast—turn your thoughts to that little sand-glass which necessarily limits, and may be paralyses the due accomplishment of my present task. page 63 The sand therein you know is the débris of ancient continents, existing ages upon ages ago, and teeming with life and happiness and beauty upon this our globe long anterior to the advent of man. The why and the whither of this amazing prodigality of duration as much baffle and evade us as do the stars. And next think of the materials which constitute the glass, that curious transparent envelope which contains the sand. Every particle of one of these materials has passed through the tissues of creatures, living, no doubt, a pleasurable existence in some primæval waters; while the other material aided the life and the growth of the beautiful flora which adorned its shores. Of this prodigality of resource and variety in Nature, its why and its whither, surprise, baffle and evade us. But it is not so much the sand, or the glass containing it, to which I desire to draw your attention; but it is rather to something else within the glass—viz., the atmospheric gaseous substances, which, though invisible, are to my mind far more marvellous, and in one sense far more stupendous, than are the incalculable numbers and the subtle arrangements observable in the starry heavens. For modern science has revealed to us the existence, within that glass, of myriads of myriads of myriads of entities—the mind becomes stupefied in reckoning up their numbers—yet moving amongst each other with velocities measurable by no terrestrial standards, but approaching rather the velocities of the planets, and dashing against each other and against the sides of the glass, produce, by their orderly conflicts, all those varied effects which we classify under the names of atmospheric pressure, heat, and light, and electricity. Moreover, each one of these innumerable atoms has its distinctive and characteristic weight, infinitesimal though it be. Each from primæval time has been endued with its own unalterable individuality, its definite likes and dislikes, and its own associative energy. Such is the wondrous constitution revealed to us by the ingenious diligence of modern research, of the aeriform substances constituting the atmosphere within that glass.

Rev. Professor Pritchard.

"Generally speaking, the preservation of the happiness of sensitive creatures appears to be the great object of creative exertion and conservative providence. The expanding of our faculties, both bodily and mental, is accompanied with pleasure, the exercise of those powers is almost always attended with gratification; all labour so acts as to make rest particularly delicious; much of labour is enjoyment; the gratification of those appetites by which both the individual is preserved and the race is continued, is highly pleasurable to all animals; and it must be observed that instead of being attracted by grateful sensations to do anything requisite for our good or even our existence, we might have been just as certainly urged by the feeling of pain, or the dread of it, which is a kind of suffering in itself. Nature, then, resembles the lawgiver who, to make his subjects obey, should prefer holding out rewards for compliance with page 64 his commands rather than denounce punishments for disobedience. But nature is yet more kind; she is gratuitously kind; she not only prefers inducement to threat or compulsion, but she adds more gratification than was necessary to make us obey her calls. How well might all creation have existed and been continued, though the air had not been balmy in spring, or the shade and the spring refreshing in summer; had the earth not been enamelled with flowers, and the air scented with perfumes! How needless for the propagation of plants was it that the seed should be enveloped in fruits the most savoury to our palate, and if those fruits serve some other purpose, how foreign to that purpose was the formation of our nerves so framed as to be soothed or excited by their flavour! We here perceive Design, because we trace adaptation. But we at the same time perceive Benevolent Design, because we perceive gratuitous and supererogatory enjoyment bestowed."

Henry Lord Brougham.

"After I saw clearly the system of divine administration of the world through natural laws, instead of clashing and discordant sentiment, I attained to harmony and peace of mind. Instead of looking only to heaven to find God, I saw him in every institution of nature. I heard his voice, and saw his power, wisdom, and goodness in me and around me; my Causality and moral sentiments were reconciled, and this was not a mere speculative belief. I felt myself living every moment in the presence of God, and this state of mind is my constant experience and delight. Twenty times a day death is present to my thoughts, and even in my happiest moments I contemplate it with satisfaction, without any reference to a future state whatever, as a mere demission of this mortal body when its powers of usefulness and enjoyment are exhausted. Every step I advance in the knowledge of nature and of human life deepens the impression of the incalculable good effects which the sentiment of Veneration could produce were it employed to rouse the other faculties to seek out God in nature, to discover His will, and to enforce on them the necessity and advantage of obeying it. In such a worship the Veneration of the profound thinkers could participate. They would become the leaders and pioneers of new views of divine grace; and the pulpit would become the glorious fountain of practical truth, devotion, justice, and humanity, with exhaustless stores of knowledge for the intellect, and glowing themes for the sentiments."

George Combe.