RELIGION. 



315 



kill it, I do this designedly. An innocent and good man stands 

 under a tree and is killed by a flash of lightning. Do you 

 believe (and I really should like to hear) that God designedly 

 killed this man ? Many or most persons do believe this ; I 

 can't and don't. If you believe so, do you believe that when 

 a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that par- 

 ticular swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that 

 particular instant ? I believe that the man and the gnat are 

 in the same predicament. If the death of neither man nor 

 gnat are designed, I see no good reason to believe that their 

 first birth or production should be necessarily designed."] 



C. Darwin to W. Graham. 



Down, July 3rd, 1881. 



DEAR SIR, 



I hope that you will not think it intrusive on my part 

 to thank you heartily for the pleasure which I have derived 

 from reading your admirably written 'Creed of Science,' 

 though I have not yet quite finished it, as now that I am old 

 I read very slowly. It is a very long time since any other 

 book has interested me so much. The work must have cost 

 you several years and much hard labour with full leisure for 

 work. You would not probably expect any one fully to agree 

 with you on so many abstruse subjects ; and there are some 

 points in your book which I cannot digest. The chief one is 

 that the existence of so-called natural laws implies purpose. 

 I cannot see this. Not to mention that many expect that 

 the several great laws will some day be found to follow 

 inevitably from some one single law, yet taking the laws as 

 we now know them, and look at the moon, where the law of 

 gravitation and no doubt of the conservation of energy of 

 the atomic theory, &c. &c., hold good, and I cannot see that 

 there is then necessarily any purpose. Would there be 

 purpose if the lowest organisms alone, destitute of con- 



