Evolution as Related to Religious Thought. 327 



his book, on which the Orthodox have pounced as eagerly 

 as an ant upon an aphis, covetous of that drop of limpid 

 juice, so pleasant to their taste. These phrases, which Or- 

 thodoxy has more highly prized than all the oceanic deep 

 of thought on which they are a bit of flying foam, count for 

 just nothing with the unbiassed student seeking to penetrate 

 the actual significance of Darwin's speculation for religious 

 thought and life. A mechanical Creator, no matter how 

 remote, stands not in the order of his thought, which sug- 

 gests no fragment of organic evolution set in a frame of 

 anthropomorphic creation, but a process of organic evolution 

 that is co-extensive with the range of universal life. Crea- 

 tion by law, evolution by law, development by law, these 

 are apologetic and consoling phrases which imply a God 

 external to the world. From Darwin's proper self they 

 have no warrant. His deepest thought echoed the song of 

 Goethe when he sang, — 



"What were a God who sat outside to scan 

 The spheres that 'neath his ringer circling ran ? 

 God dwells in all, and moves the world, and moulds ; 

 Himself and nature in one form enfolds." 



The point at which the scheme of Darwin has most obvi- 

 ously traversed the scheme of natural theology as expounded 

 by Bell and Paley, and a host of equally ingenious writers, 

 is that philosophically known as teleology (i. e., the doctrine 

 of ends), more popularly as the argument from design. But 

 it ought not to be forgotten that this argument, which was 

 once equally satisfactory to Thomas Paine and his most 

 Orthodox opponents, did not by any means wait for the ap- 

 pearance of Darwin to bring it into disrepute. Physics was 

 still enamored of this argument when metaphysics demon- 

 strated its intrinsic worthlessness. Kant never did a more 

 effective piece of work than his arraignment of the argument 

 from design, — the physico-theological argument he called 

 it, — for the being of a God. But though the Transcendent- 

 alists left the watch-maker Deity of Paley wounded and 

 half-dead by the way, it must be allowed that Darwin has 

 not played the good Samaritan. He has finished what the 

 Transcendentalists began. It is not merely that he has 

 shown up the absurdity of the egotistic presumption that all 

 things are designed for human comfort and advantage, a 

 presumption of which the travesty, "cork-trees for corks to 

 bottle our champagne," is not more absurd than the bona- 



