NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 735 



Wesley, was developed into nobler form during the century by 

 various thinkers, and especially by Archdeacon Paley, whose 

 Natural Theology exercised a powerful influence down to recent 

 times. The same tendency appeared in other countries. Various 

 philosophers did indeed show weak points in the argument, and 

 Goethe made sport of it in a noted verse, praising the forethought 

 of the Creator in foreordaining the co"rk tree to furnish stoppers 

 for wine-bottles. 



Shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century the main 

 movement culminated in the Bridgewater Treatises. Pursuant to 

 the will of the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, the President of the 

 Royal Society selected eight persons, each to receive a thousand 

 pounds sterling for writing and publishing a treatise on the 

 " power, wisdom, and goodness of God, as manifested in the crea- 

 tion." Of these, the leading essays in regard to animated Nature 

 were those of Thomas Chalmers, on The Adaptation of External 

 Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Condition of Man ; of Sir 

 Charles Bell, on The Hand, as evincing Design ; of Roget, Animal 

 and Vegetable Physiology with reference to Natural Theology; 

 and of Kirby, on The Habits and Instincts of Animals with refer- 

 ence to Natural Theology. 



Besides these there were treatises by Whewell, Buckland, 

 Kidd, and Prout. The work was nobly done. It was a marked 

 advance on all that had appeared before in matter, method, and 

 spirit. Looking back upon it now we can see that it was pro- 

 visional, but that it was none the less fruitful in truth. Here we 

 may well remember Darwin's remark on the stimulating effect of 

 mistaken theories, as compared with the sterilizing effect of mis- 

 taken observations : mistaken observations lead men astray, mis- 

 taken theories suggest true theories. 



An effort made in so noble a spirit certainly does not deserve 

 the ridicule that, in our own day, has sometimes been lavished 

 upon it. Curiously, indeed, one of the most contemptuous of 

 these criticisms has been recently made by one of the most strenu- 

 ous defenders of orthodoxy. No less eminent a standard-bearer 

 of the faith than the Rev. Prof. Zoeckler says of this great move- 

 ment to demonstrate creative purpose and design, and of the men 

 who took part in it, " The earth appeared in their representation 

 of it like a great clothing shop and soup kitchen, and God as a 

 glorified rationalistic professor." Such a statement as this is far 

 from just to the conceptions of such men as Butler, Paley, and 

 Chalmers, no matter how fully the thinking world has now out- 

 lived them.* 



* For Ray, see the work cited, London, 1827, p. 153. For Grew, see Cosmologia Sacra, 

 or a Discourse on the Universe, as it is the Creature and Kingdom of God ; chiefly written 



