38 THE CEEED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



destruction, or to suit itself to its conditions. There is 

 certainly no room for a Creator who planned and exe- 

 cuted organisms with their adaptations according to 

 men's old conception; there is scarcely room even for 

 mind, in the most extended sense of the word ; and there 

 appears in the long process no trace of a guiding purpose. 

 Chance, and unimaginable years which favoured it (for 

 natural selection is but a phrase for the endless operation 

 of chance), are the two shadowy and impalpable agents 

 that alone appear as the authors of the protracted world- 

 drama called evolution, from which both we and the 

 worlds have come. These alone have produced the life, 

 variety, adaptation, and beauty of the organic world. 



8. Again, on the moral side, theology and philo- 

 sophy, after weighing Darwin's story so strange and 

 terrible and hopeful by turns must look to and recon- 

 sider their first principles. For the old question of the 

 origin and continuance of evil in this universe of strife, 

 is once more raised up vividly before us ; and this time 

 it receives a new and simple, though sinister, solution. 

 Formerly the knot which puzzled the philosophers was 

 to reconcile the existence of benevolence in the Deity 

 with so much evil and pain which was so antagonistic to 

 it ; now this part of the problem vanishes with the con- 

 scious personality of the Deity. No one, it seems, is to 

 blame for all the evil that man and the other species 

 have suffered. The evil lies in the nature of things 

 which brought about conscious life, and finally in the 

 properties of matter, according to the materialist. 

 Nature, being impersonal and unconscious, is not to 

 blame ; at least it is useless to blame her. Were she 

 conscious, and had she laboured with any connected and 

 persistent purposes, she would be a criminal, as the pessi- 

 mist argues. But in reality, she had no more a malevo- 



