REFL E C TIONS A ND C ONCL US I ON. 413 



has been a slow and gradual process, demanding un- 

 told aeons for converting chaos into a cosmos, and 

 for giving to the visible universe all the beauty and 

 harmony which it now exhibits. It seems, indeed, 

 more consonant with our ideas of God, to Whom a 

 thousand years are as one day and one day as a 

 thousand years, to conceive Him as creating all 

 things in the beginning, and in ordering and admin- 

 istering them afterwards through the agency of sec- 

 ondary causes, rather than to represent Him as 

 perpetually taking up a work which He had left 

 unfinished, and bringing it to a state of perfection 

 only by a long series of interferences and special 

 creations. Understood in this, its true sense, Evo- 

 lution teaches, as Temple phrases it, that the execu- 

 tion of God's " purpose belongs more to the original 

 act of creation, less to acts of government. There is 

 more Divine foresight, there is less Divine interpo- 

 sition ; and whatever has been taken from the latter 

 has been added to the former." ' 



Rudimentary Organs. 



For a long time naturalists were sorely puzzled 

 as to how to account for the existence of nascent 

 and rudimentary organs, which are manifestly of no 

 use to their possessors. On the theory of special 

 creations, the only explanation that could be offered 

 for their existence was, that the Creator added them 

 for the sake of symmetry, or because they were a 

 part of His plan. Evolution, however, which con- 

 templates not only the history of the individual but 



1 "The Relations Between Religion and Science," p. 123. 



