NEWTON AND DARWIN. I3 



the fancies of dogmatic religion, some parts of the 

 complex systems which the Kabbmistic type of erudi- 

 tion has invented in all religions, should seem incom- 

 patible with these developments of our knowledge 

 and still wider enlargements of our conceptio s, can 

 be understood. But that religion, in which all men 

 may (in which all reasoning men must) agree, has 

 been rendered infinitely grander infinitely more im- 

 pressive by our new knowledge. It has also been 

 rendered infinitely more reasonable. Men had spoken 

 of God as Omnipresent and Almighty, but they had 

 assigned a mere point in space as his domain ; they 

 had described him as Eternal, but they had recog- 

 nised his influence as existing for the merest second 

 of time ; and finally they had in words attributed all 

 Wisdom to him, while in fact they had limited his 

 wisdom to the provision of laws capable of operating 

 but imperfectly, and for a brief period. Science 

 shows now the infinite domain of the Omnipresent, 

 its inconceivably vast duration, the perfection of tho 

 laws which so rule it that they operate throughout all 

 space and all time. Yet a few who cannot raise their 

 eyes from this petty earth to the heavens, or extend 

 their thoughts to perceive the perfection of the laws 

 governing a universe for all time (as we know time) 

 find no nobler teaching in these grandest revelations 

 of science than that ' ' God is set on one side in the 

 name of universal evolution." It is as though men who 

 had observed but the working of a clock's escapement 

 should regard the discovery of the train of wheels 



