RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 27 1 



nary reasoner, no doubt, would here say that the 

 nature of the Eternal Cause was now transparently 

 revealed : the First Principle of things, whatever be 

 its nature, must in the end impress that nature upon 

 the things that survive, and the final survivals must 

 therefore be sure indications of the nature ; but the 

 things that survive in evolution, through the vast 

 process of natural selection, bear the impress of a 

 reasonable nature, reasonable in the highest sense ; 

 whence it seems irresistibly to follow that the nature 

 of the Eternal Cause must be a reasonable nature, 

 and in the highest sense. But the keener logicians 

 of the agnostic or the pantheistic type call our atten- 

 tion to a flaw in this reasoning, apparently so right 

 and so plain ; and I account their warning just. 



They say one cannot rightly reason from partial or 

 uncompleted effects of a cause, to the unquestionable 

 nature of the cause; and that the final, the abso- 

 lutely decisive results of evolution are not known 

 to us, nor are they knowable. To reason from the 

 drift of phenomenal development on the surface of 

 the earth, or even in the visible heavens, however 

 plain such drift may be, to the ultimate results of the 

 Eternal Energy is unwarrantable, by reason of too 

 sweeping an induction. The verifiable trend of evi.- 

 lution does not and cannot reach to the final effects 

 of the First Principle ; yet only in the knowledge of 

 these final effects is the real nature of this Principle 



