ON THE BEAUTY OF NATURE. 263 
neously into an endless variety of beauty-making forces as 
well as others, let him begin and show us how he thinks the 
first step was taken without the aid of anything that can be 
called a mind, or a designing power intending to produce the 
results that are apparent everywhere. The anticreationists 
take care never to attempt anything of the kind, and therefore 
they cut their own throats as inventors of a cosmogony. 
I have only one more point to deal with, very shortly. 
These people may ask us how we account for such a designing 
power as we assert to be the only possible producer of all the 
beauty of the world leaving anything ugly. The proper 
answer is that we cannot tell, beyond this: He has Himself 
told us that He did not mean to make this world perfect, either 
morally or physically. He has not told us why, and all the 
guessing in the world will never be any more than guessing, 
quite incapable of proof. It is only another guess, that an 
omnipotent creator would not make an imperfect world, to be 
hereafter changed into a perfect one, and a guess worth 
nothing in the face of all the facts, including this—which the 
evolutionists themselves insist on more than anybody—that 
the world has, on the whole, improved immensely. The 
dictum that an omnipotent creator would have made it perfect 
at once means nothing more than that we think we should if 
we had had the making of the world, and that we do not 
know the reasons why it has been made otherwise. But, as a 
matter of fact, it has, and with an amount of contrivance 
which is still quite beyond our understanding in many 
essential points, even in the fundamental constitution of all 
matter, and in the nature of the primary forces of gravity, 
electricity, heat, and nearly every physiological operation of 
nature. 
Of those in general I have not been speaking in this paper, 
but only of the special laws and forces of nature which 
in some quite unknown way produce the unnecessary but 
delightful results that we call beauty. We are ready to 
attend to any theory of creation which professes to account 
for all of it. Theories to account for little bits alone are not 
worth attending to in any science, and, @ fortiori, not in the 
science of cosmogony. Our theory accounts for it all; and 
therefore by all scientific rules it is good until it can be 
supplanted by a better, of which there is no symptom yet. 
And therefore it is scientifically indisputable, that beauty, like 
“every good gift and every perfect gift, is from above, and 
cometh down from the Father of hghts, with whom is no 
variableness nor shadow of turning.” 
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