DARWINISM AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH. 215 



So in the case of organs, we believe tliat " organs liave been 

 formed so that their possessors may compete successfully with 

 other beings and thus increase their number." * We fearlessly 

 then ask, in reference to each part, What is its use ? And if it 

 is of no present use, we do not say, " The Creator put it there for 

 symmetry, or as part of a plan," but we ask. What meaning has 

 it had in the past ? How can we relate it with by-gone if not 

 with existing conditions ? If ontogeny, the history of the indi- 

 vidual, gives us no answer, we fall back upon phylogeny, the his- 

 tory of the race. Organs, which on the old theory of special 

 creations were useless and meaningless, are now seen to have 

 their explanation in the past or in the future, according as they 

 are rudimentary or nascent. There is nothing useless, nothing 

 meaningless in Nature, nothing due to caprice or chance, noth- 

 ing irrational or without a cause, nothing outside the reign of 

 law. This belief in the universality of law and order is the sci- 

 entific analogue of the Christian's belief in Providence. And, 

 as Prof. Huxley admits, it is an " act of faith," brought to Nature, 

 and slowly, and as yet only in part, verified in Nature. Yet to 

 doubt that Nature is everywhere rational, and therefore intelli- 

 gible, would be for a scientific man an act of intellectual suicide. 



But if we believe in law and order everywhere in Nature, 

 though there is so much which is as yet hopelessly irreducible 

 to law, and if that belief is read into Nature long before we can 

 read it m Nature, may we not approach the moral difficulty in 

 the same spirit ? For there is here a curious parallel. What our 

 rational nature resents is not the existence of facts which we can 

 not explain, but of facts which have no explanation ; and what 

 the moral nature rebels at is not suffering and pain, but need- 

 less — i. e., meaningless — pain, suffering which might have been 

 avoided. And here Darwinism gives us a hint, if it is but a hint : 

 " Natural selection works solely by and for the good of each be- 

 ing." t The arrangement of the world is " generally beneficent," | 

 and " tends to progress toward perfection." But then — 



Without the competing multitude, no struggle for life, and without this no 

 natural selection and survival of the fittest, no continuous adaptation to chang- 

 ing surroundings, no diversification and improvement leading from lower up to 

 higher forms. So the most puzzHng things of all to the old school of teleologists 

 are the principia of the Darwinian.* 



It is no final solution of the difficulty, and yet man, who is so 

 wise and good that he is always saying with King Alphonso of 

 Castile, " If God had called me to his councils things would have 

 been in better order," has invented competitive examinations, 



* " Life and Letters," i, p. 280, f " Origin," p. 428. X i, p. 279. 



* Asa Gray, p, 378. 



