334 INVOLUTION. 



claims to show how things have been made is the 

 groundless fear that if we discover how they are made 

 we minimize their divinity. When things are known, 

 that is to say, we conceive them as natural, on Man's 

 level ; when they are unknown, we call them divine — 

 as if our ignorance of a thing were the stamp of its 

 divinity. If God is only to be left to the gaps in our 

 knowledge, where shall we be when these gaps are 

 filled up ? And if they are never to be filled up, is 

 God only to be found in the disorders of the world ? 

 Those who yield to the temptation to reserve a point 

 here and there for special divine interposition are apt 

 to forget that this virtually excludes God from the 

 rest of the process. If God appears periodically, he 

 disappears periodically. If he comes upon the scene at 

 special crises he is absent from the scene in the inter- 

 vals. Whether is all-God or occasional-God the no- 

 bler theory ? Positively, the idea of an immanent God, 

 which is the God of Evolution, is infinitely grander 

 than the occasional wonder-worker who is the God of 

 an old theology. Negatively, the older view is not 

 only the less worthy, but it is discredited by science. 

 And as to facts, the daily miracle of a flower, the 

 courses of the stars, the uphokUng and sustaining day 

 by day of this great palpitating world, need a living 

 Will as much as the creation of atoms at the first. We 

 know growth is the method by which things are made 

 in Nature, and we know no other method. We do not 

 know that there are not other methods ; but if there 

 are we do not know them. Those cases which we 

 do not know to be growths, we do not know to be 

 anything else, and we may at least suspect them to 

 be growths. Nor are they any the less miraculous 



