SOUNDINGS 



righteousness endureth forever. The triumph of the 

 wicked is only for a season; it may be a long season, 

 it may embrace whole periods of human history, 

 and entail measureless suffering on the human race, 

 but change and retribution surely come. The way 

 of man's moral and material progress is like the 

 stream that now hurries, now tarries, is now dis- 

 rupted and noisy in rapids and falls, now sluggish 

 and almost stagnant in long level reaches, but 

 which does go forward and reach its goal at last. 

 But is there not some predetermined bent toward 

 righteousness, — not of the ecclesiastical sort, but 

 of the scientific sort, — toward the relations of 

 man with man, that results in the greatest good to 

 the greatest number, — a bent inherent in the 

 nature of things? Would evolution have taken 

 the road toward man and all the other forms of 

 life blindly, accidentally? Would it have started 

 at all had there not been some initial impulse, 

 or some thought, somewhere, of all that was to 

 follow? 



The doctrine of design does not meet the prob- 

 lem ; the doctrine of chance does not meet it. Design 

 in our human world means a designer. What, then, 

 does it mean in the non-human world? There can be 

 no design in such a world, because the human mind 

 is not present. There can be no chance, because a 

 chance jumbling and collision of the primordial 

 elements could not result in the organized mattel 



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