81 



Mr. Darwin has never yet asserted to be his belief, and which 

 may be expressed briefly thus : that " the origin of species by 

 natural selection is not subject to higher law.'' A few sen- 

 tences in the Origin of Species and one strong protest in his 

 Descent of Man are all, as far as I can remember, that he has 

 uttered. It is to be deeply regretted ; for I believe I am right 

 in saying that in his indifference to preconceived prejudices, in 

 his fearless exposition of what he believes to be the truth, he 

 has raised a great stumbling-block to the general acceptance of 

 the theory of evolution, which, though no doubt destined ulti- 

 mately to hold sway, yet has been retarded in its progress by 

 one of its greatest advocates. 



As an illustration of an utter perversion of interpretation 

 of Mr. Darwin and others' writings, I take the following sen- 

 tence from Bishop Perry's Science and the Bible, who, speaking 

 of The Vestiges of Creation, The Origin of Species, and Pro- 

 toplasm, thus writes : — If I have spoken of these three works 

 with severity, it has been because the object of the writers ob- 

 viously (?) is to produce in their readers a disbelief of the 

 Bible " ! 



Notwithstanding that I am attempting to place Mr. Darwin 

 on a right footing with his numerous misjudging readers, I 

 must take him to task for misjudging himself. He tells us 

 he does not believe in design ; but I find in his work that he 

 believes in the Creator, " Whose works far surpass those of 

 man." What can that sentence imply but an intuitive recogni- 

 tion of the very basis of the argument for design? Mr. Darwin 

 can no more throw off those feelings than Lotze. God's works 

 may have been evolved, and not directly created; but, take 

 creation as we find it, and design defies us everywhere ! It is 

 solely on design, and nothing else, that we recognize the 

 superiority of nature's works, and that superiority forces us to 

 acknowledge their author as God. 



When Mr. Darwin makes that solemn protest wherein he 

 says [Descent of Man, vol. ii. p. 396), " The birth both of the 

 species and the individual are equally parts of that grand 

 sequence of events which our minds refuse to accept as the 

 result of blind chance. The understanding revolts at such a 

 conclusion, whether or not we are able to believe that every 

 slight variation of structure, — the union of each pair in mar- 

 riage, — the dissemination of each seed, — and other such events, 

 have all been ordained for some special purpose," he recognizes 

 sequence as law, and law as the will of God, — and that is 

 design. Mr. Darwin believes in it in spite of himself, though 

 he may, as I do, disbelieve in a special act of creation for each 

 organism. 



