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SYDNEY T. KLEIN, P.L.S., F.R.A.S.^ ON THE 



factor in Evolution, is past my comprehension ; the very root of the 

 contention of my whole paper is that God does not only direct, but is 

 Himself the actual working Agent of every process in Nature, for 

 all the various phenomena of " progress towards perfection " are but 

 the glimpses we get of the working of His Will. 



The opening paragraph of my paper, where I stated that " Time 

 and Space are only modes or conditions under which our Senses act, 

 and by which we get a very limited and illusory knowledge of our 

 surroundings," has evidently quite upset Professor Orchard, as he 

 says such a thought is "intellectual suicide" ! I can only refer him 

 again to my former paper to this Institution dealing with that 

 subject, but he goes further and makes the extraordinary statement 

 that it is also to cast a slur upon the character of God by representing 

 our Creator as a deceiver ! It is difficult to treat such statements 

 seriously. Apart from the question as to how God can possibly be 

 said to have a " character," every thinking person knows that our 

 Senses are apt to, and do, woefully deceive us, that perception 

 without sufficient knowledge leads us into false concepts, which in 

 their turn get us into difficulties, both in the Physical and Meta- 

 physical, and this fact is the greatest incentive we have to earnestly 

 seek for and gain further knowledge to correct those erroneous conclu- 

 sions. Was it a slur on God's character that for hundreds of thousands 

 of years man was deceived by his sense of sight into believing that 

 this little earth was the centre of everything, that it was fixed in 

 Space and that the Sun and Stars and the Universe revolved around 

 it "? or, when Galileo proved that this perception was erroneous, was 

 it a slur on God's character that his Human Agents in this World 

 declared, and maintained for hundreds of years after, that it was a 

 sacrilegious invention and threatened with death any one who should 

 dare to believe what they, in their blind dogmatism, declared was 

 contrary to the teaching of Scripture ! God may perhaps be looked 

 upon as having given us our present imperfect senses, and as having 

 helped us, under His plan for natural progression, to improve and 

 largely extend their powers, during the last 300 years, by the 

 invention of various instruments ; but by no stretch of the imagina- 

 tion can He be held responsible for the way in which we use those 

 Senses ; their present imperfections as truth finders are, as I have 

 pointed out, one of our greatest incentives to gain further knowledge. 

 Professor Orchard trots out again, as he did in the discussion on my 



