516 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



to keep their belief in it, and in spite of the impossibility of supporting it by the 

 old arguments. 



And, when men have become accustomed to rest their belief on new grounds, 

 the loss of the old arguments is never found to be a very serious matter. Belief 

 in revelation has been shaken again and again by this very increase of knowl- 

 edge. It was unquestionably a dreadful blow to many in the days of Galileo to 

 find that the language of the Bible in regard to the movement of the earth and 

 sun was not scientifically correct. It was a dreadful blow to many in the days 

 of the Reformation to find that they had been misled by what they believed to 

 be an infallible Church. 



Such shocks to faith try the mettle of men's moral and spiritual convictions, 

 and they often refuse altogether to hold what they can no longer establish by the 

 arguments which have hitherto been to them the decisive, perhaps the sole de- 

 cisive, proofs. 



And yet, in spite of these shocks, belief in revelation is strong still in men's 

 souls, and is clearly not yet going to quit the world. 



But let us go on to consider how far it is true that the arguments which have 

 hitherto been regarded as proving the existence of a Supreme Creator are really 

 affected very gravely by this doctrine of evolution. 



The main argument, which at first appears to be thus set aside, is that which 

 is founded on the marks of design, and which is worked out in his own way with 

 marvelous skill by Paley in his "Natural Theology." Paley's argument rests, as 

 is well known, on the evidence of design in created things, and these evidences 

 he chiefly finds in the framework of organized living creatures. He traces with 

 much most interesting detail the many marvelous contrivances by which animals 

 of various kinds are adapted to the circumstances in which they are to live, the 

 mechanism which enables them to obtain their food, to preserve their species, to 

 escape their enemies, to remove discomforts. All nature, thus examined, and 

 particularly all animated nature, seems full of means toward ends, and those ends 

 invariably such as a beneficent Creator might well be supposed to have in view. 

 And while there is undeniably one great objection to his whole argument, namely, 

 that the Creator is represented as an artificer rather than a Creator, as overcom- 

 ing difficulties which stood in his way rather than as an Almighty Being fashion- 

 ing things according to his will, yet the argument thus drawn from evidence of 

 design remains exceedingly powerful, and it has always been considered a strong 

 corroboration of the voice within which bids us believe in a* God. Now, it cer- 

 tainly seems at first as if this argument were altogether destroyed. If animals 

 were not made as we see them, but evolved by natural law, still more if it appear 

 that their wonderful adaptation to their surroundings is due to the influence of 

 those surroundings, it might seem as if we could no longer speak of design as 

 exhibited in their various organs; the organs, we might say, grow of themselves, 

 some suitable and some unsuitable to the life of the creatures to which they be- 

 longed, and the unsuitable have perished and the suitable have survived. 



But Paley has supplied the clew to the answer. In his well-known illustra- 



