30 



MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN. 



been an atheist, in the sense of denying the existence of 

 God." 



It is true that the stress laid upon second causes, nowa- 

 days, tends to make some men ignore the First, and that the 

 explanation of the smooth machinery of the world as due 

 to the long friction of events has weakened the old-fashioned 

 form of the « argument from design." Such theories as 

 that of "Natural Selection" have not aided the ancient 

 apologetics. But any loss that comes is our own fault, not 

 that of modern science, which, as Professor Huxley' dis- 

 tinctly states, has not created a single religious difficulty. 



When we consider the lilies their teaching is nowise in- 

 terfered with by all the botanical discoveries. For that 

 teaching is the fact of beauty,— and there the beauty shines ! 

 I do not mean that this teaching belongs exclusively to 

 flowers: beauty is, of course, found elsewhere. But 

 nowhere else is it so displayed, so seemingly disconnected 

 from use, so salient and self-reliant. 



What if we can trace the ancestry of these brilliant 

 blossoms back to some bare and homely duckweed, rootless, 

 stemless, flowerless. Here are the lilies ! And what if all 

 their glory be the result of a long course of insect-culture, 

 if the shape and flecking of petals and the grouping of 

 golden anthers serve to entice or accommodate moths°and 

 bees. Here are the lilies, and here are we to rejoice in them I 

 However beauty came it is. Undefinable, as all facts 

 simple and radical must be, it is undeniable. 



From out the stupendous mechanism of the universe 

 appear exquisite pictures, now frescoed on the vault of the 

 sky, now miniatured on the shard of a beetle. And these 

 pictures are to be looked at. Unless there are spectators 

 they do not really exist. In other words the argument for 

 a Creative Mind drawn from evidences of design in nature 

 has its clearest and most cogent proofs in natural beauty. 

 Much of the working of the world might be what it is, 

 and go on as it does, were the world inhabited only by the 

 brutes. In the far-off Devonian seas and Carboniferous 



