412 Darwin, and after Darwin. 



tapped at their fountain-head : the adaptation and 

 the beauty are alike receiving their explanation at 

 the hands of a purely mechanical philosophy. Nay, 

 even the personality of man himself is assailed ; and 

 this not only in the features which he shares with 

 the lower animals, but also in his god-like attributes 

 of reason, thought, and conscience. All nature has 

 thus been transformed before the view of the present 

 generation in a manner and to an extent that has 

 never before been possible : and inasmuch as the 

 change which has taken place has taken place in 

 the direction of naturalism, and this to the extent of 

 rendering the mechanical interpretation of nature uni- 

 versal,it is no wonder if the religious mind has suddenly 

 awakened to a new and a terrible force in the words of 

 its traditional enemy Where is now thy God ? 



This is not the place to discuss the bearings of 

 science on religion l ; but I think it is a place where 

 one may properly point out the limits within which no 

 such bearings obtain. Now, from what has just been 

 said, it will be apparent that I am not going to 

 minimise the change which has been wrought. On 

 the contrary, I believe it is only stupidity or affecta- 

 tion which can deny that the change in question is 

 more deep and broad than any single previous change 

 in the whole history of human thought. It is a fun- 

 damental, a cosmical, a world-transforming change. 

 Nevertheless, in my opinion, it is a change of a non- 

 theistic, as distinguished from an a-theistic, kind. It 

 has rendered impossible the appearance in literature 

 of any future Paley, Bell, or Chalmers ; but it has 



1 The best treatise on this subject is Pro Le Conte's Evolution and 

 its Relation to Religious Thought (Appleton & Co. 1888). 



