412 Darwin, and after Darwin. 
tapped at their fountain-head: the adaptation and 
the beauty are alike receiving their explanation at 
the hands of a purely mechanical philosophy. Nay, 
even the personality of man himself is assailed; and 
this not only in the features which he shares with 
the lower animals, but also in his god-like attributes 
of reason, thought, and conscience. All nature has 
thus been transformed before the view of the present 
generation in a manner and to an extent that has 
never before been possible: and inasmuch as the 
change which has taken place has taken place in 
the direction of naturalism, and this to the extent of 
rendering the mechanical interpretation of nature uni- 
versal, it is no wonder if the religious mind has suddenly 
awakened to a new and a terrible force in the words of 
its traditional enemy—Where is now thy God? 
This is not the place to discuss the bearings of 
science on religion'; but I think it is a place where 
one may properly point out the limits within which no 
such bearings obtain. Now. from what has just been 
said, it will be apparent that I am not going to 
minimise the change which has been wrought. On 
the contrary, I believe it is only stupidity or affecta- 
tion which can deny that the change in question is 
more deep and broad than any single previous change 
in the whole history of human thought. It is a fun- 
damental, a cosmical, a world-transforming change. 
Nevertheless, in my opinion, it is a change of a non- 
theistic, as distinguished from an a-theistic, kind. It 
has rendered impossible the appearance in literature 
of any future Paley, Bell, or Chalmers; but it has 
1 The best treatise on this subject is Prof. Le Conte’s Evolution and 
ts Relation to Religious Thought (Appleton & Co. 1888). 
