Scientific Evolution. 143 



teaching. With loud professions of man's necessary ignor- 

 ance is often joined a confident assertion as to the details 

 of that course which would certainly be followed by a 

 being of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, did such a 

 being exist. 



For one of the latest examples of the spirit of this 

 teaching we are indebted to Dr. Struther, who pro- 

 pounded at Bradford an argument which has been* thus 

 summarised : " Because one or two individuals have died 

 from the impactation of cherry-stones in the appendix 

 vermiformis, therefore there is no God." We have no 

 evidence of the possibility having occurred to that gentle- 

 man that an indefinite number of final causes for the 

 structure in question may (though unthought of by him) 

 have preceded the existence of matter at all, and that 

 amongst them might be the intellectual and moral effects 

 of its contemplation on the minds of different men. 



The specimen cited is typical, because the religious 

 doctrines directly and openly, or obliquely and covertly 

 attacked in connection with the teaching referred to, are 

 not those of Christianity specially, but of theism generally. 

 The direction of attack has indeed greatly changed since 

 the epoch of the " deists." It is now pretty generally 

 admitted, with regard to " Christianity " and " theism " 

 that arguments really telling against the first are in their 



* In Nature, Oct. 16, 1873, v l- v "i-> No. 207, p. 509. 



