INTRODUCTION. 7 



him, or of any writer, if we have not actually read his books ; 

 and if we have read them, it still does not matter what we say, 

 if the opinion be one borrowed from without. A man has no 

 opinions but those which are naturally formed within him and 

 his ver}' own. 



All manner of opinion from without interfered in 1844, espe- 

 cially in Scotland, with the fair reading of a book like this of 

 '* Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation." It was met by 

 a storm of prejudice that has now rolled away. It was a book 

 written by a religious, earnest man who had seen and felt the 

 harmony of Order in the works of God. He Avas driven to 

 explain to those who misunderstood him, " The book is not 

 primarily designed, as many have intimated in their criticisms, 

 and as the Title might be thought partly to imply, to establish 

 a new theory respecting the origin of animated nature ; nor are 

 the chief arguments directed to that point. The object is one 

 to which the idea of an organic creation in the manner of 

 natural law is only subordinate and ministrative, as likewise 

 are the nebular hypothesis and the doctrine of a fixed natural 

 order in mind and morals. This purpose is to show that the 

 whole revelation of the works of God, presented to our senses 

 ond reason, is a system based on what we are compelled, for 

 want of a better term, to call Law ; by which, however, is not 

 meant a system independent or exclusive of Deity, but one 

 which only proposes a certain mode of His working." To this 

 fact, he said, science had long pointed, though it had hardly 

 anywhere been broadly and fully contemplated. 



Robert Chambers was born in July 1802; Charles Darwin, in 

 February 1809. '' Yestiges of the I^atural History of Creation '' 

 appeared in 1844; "The Origin of Species" in 1859. Darwin 

 prefaced his book with a long list of the pointings of science to 

 the generalisation on which he insisted. But Charles Darwin's 

 generalisation, worked out by a mind fully trained to science, 

 and with rare and special power, was for a long time subject to 

 as grave misunderstanding as the argument of the " Yestio-es." 

 Yet, whether theories of development be right or wrong, certain 

 it is that those who accept them do not touch one vital point of 

 Christian faith. They can only add strength to our sense of 

 the infinite Wisdom of the Creator. Do we deny our Maker 

 because each one of us is developed from the germ to the infantj 



