Anniversary Address. 4^1 



with Lord Bacon that they would sooner believe all the 

 follies of the Talmud and Koran, than that this universal 

 frame is without a mind, that this Order and Beauty should 

 have been produced by an army without a Divine Marshal ; 

 and who have endorsed with emphasis, and continue to en- 

 dorse the words uttered long ago, vrith almost prophetic 

 strain, by a man at Cambridge, one Isaac Newton, words 

 which seem to have for us who live in these latter days, a 

 yet fuller interest and importance — " The world was not 

 made by spontaneous energy and evolution of self-develop- 

 ing powers, as some have affirmed, but it was created by 

 one Almighty, Eternal, Wise, Good Being, God. " 



The important part of the question, then, which we are 

 immediately considering, appears in a different light to 

 different people, all anxious for the truth, but with differently 

 constituted minds. Will you think it presumption, if, with- 

 out committing any one else, I consider it suggestively from 

 my own view point for two or thiee minutes ? 



I submit, first, as a postulate, that the God in whom Dar- 

 winian and non-Darwinian both believe, intended to reveal 

 himself in Nature. If He did not ; if this glorious world 

 simply exists for our use alone without ultimate and higher 

 references ; if, in it all, there is nothing more than meets the 

 eye, it loses nearly all its significance, most of its interest, 

 and had better be handed over to the Materialist. 



If God, therefore, does intend to reveal Himself in Nature, 

 it must be directly as the Designer and Inventor of her in- 

 numerable wonders. In what other conceivable way could 

 they have been designed ? 



If you say " by the adaptations of Nature " and proceed to 

 point out alleged instances, I urge that the blind, unreason- 

 ing, unconscious process of adaptation, which originates a 

 Darwinian species, cannot, without doing violence to the 

 meaning of words, possibly be called Design at all, and my 

 understanding recoils from the idea that the countless arti- 

 fices, the astonishing contrivances, the refined perfections 

 with which all Nature teems, can be anything else than the 

 direct inventions of an Inventor. The more that I examine 



