202 THE REV. J. H. BERNARD, D.D., ON THE 



brought against the argument of design applies with equal force 

 to the argument of Evolution — i.e., if design only proves a finite 

 designer and not an Infinite God, so, in the same way, Evolution 

 only proves a limited course of change, because in order to start 

 Evolution, you want an organism to be evolved to begin with, 

 and an environment in which it is to be placed and to which it 

 shall be adapted. Therefore Evolution cannot be substituted for 

 creation, but it must stai't from a beginning already produced in 

 some other way, and it cannot trace things down to their first 

 origin. Then what becomes of the argument of design under the 

 theory of Evolution ? If you pursue this theory to its furthest 

 extreme, as some try to do, and say that everything has been 

 evolved by a process of natural selection, or that everything 

 is an adaptation of some kind from primordial matter, where 

 then does the argument of design come in ? It seems to me that 

 it comes in in this way. Darwin's hypothesis of Natural Selection 

 is sometimes expressed in these terms — that offspring are not 

 exactly like the parent ; but there occur chance variations, and 

 that anyone of those variations which happens by chance to be 

 beneficial to the offspring is preserved and intensified by the 

 action of natural selection. That is all very well as far as it 

 goes, but I suppose every student of Evolution, if the point were 

 pressed on him, would have to admit that when he talks about 

 chance variation, he is only using a provisional expression accom- 

 modated to his own ignorance. Science has nothing to do with 

 chance. Every effect must have a cause. That aphorism lies at 

 t he very basis of Science and therefore we may say that there is no 

 such thing as chance. When we talk of chance, we simply mean 

 an effect of which we do not know the cause. It must have some 

 cause, though we do not know what that cause is. Hence, if we 

 pursue the theory of Evolution to its fullest extent, we arrive at 

 a process, leading from undifferentiated matter up to what we 

 have now. In this process there is no chance and therefore its 

 coarse could not have been other than it has been ; or in other 

 words the course of evolution must have been determined before- 

 hand. By what then was it determined ? Supposing there were 

 this undifferentiated matter, why did it evolve in one way and 

 not another ? The only possible answer that can be given is that 

 there must have been design — a purpose — some purpose to which 

 the whole process of Evolution tends, and if we ask what that 



