XII.] THEOLOGY AND EVOLUTION. 273 



some who appear to find it unreasonable and absurd that 

 men should regard phenomena, in a light not furnished by 

 or deducible from the very phenomena themselves, although 

 the men so regarding them avow that the light in which 

 they do view them comes from quite another source. It is 

 as if a man, A, coming into B's room and finding there a 

 butterfly, should insist that B had no right to believe that 

 the butterfly had not flown in at the open window, inasmuch 

 as there was nothing about the room or insect to lead to 

 any other belief; while B can well sustain his right so to 

 believe, he having met 0, who told him he brought in the 

 chrysalis, arid, having seen the insect emerge, took away the 

 skin. 



By a similarly narrow and incomplete view, the asser- 

 tion that human conceptions, such as " the vertebrate idea," 

 etc., are ideas in the mind of God, is sometimes ridiculed ; 

 as if the assertors either on the one hand pretended to some 

 prodigious acuteness of mind a far-reaching genius not 

 possessed by most naturalists or, on the other hand, as if 

 they detected, in the very phenomena furnishing such 

 special conception, evidences of Divine imaginings. But 

 let the idea of God, according to the highest conceptions 

 of Christianity, be once accepted, and then it becomes 

 simply a truism to say that the mind of the Deity contains 

 all that is good and positive in the mind of man, plus, of 

 course, an absolutely inconceivable infinity beyond. That 

 thus such human conceptions may, nay must, be asserted to 

 be at the same time ideas in the Divine mind also, as every 

 real and separate individual that has been, is, or shall be, is 

 present to the same mind. Nay, more, that such human 

 conceptions are but faint and obscure adumbrations of cor- 

 responding ideas which exist in the mind of God in perfec- 

 tion and fulness. " 



n The Rev. Baden Powell says : " All sciences approach perfection as 

 they approach to a unity of first principles- hi all cases recurring to or 



