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You find, in short, that you cannot support the Darwinian theory as it stands 
without doing violence to your own mental processes. I quite admit that 1 
myself believe thoroughly in the principle of evolution , but then I do not 
exclude the principle of a Deity from it. How evolution has gone on I 
cannot say, but creation as we find it has been most undoubtedly developed 
in some way or other. If you study geology you must come to that conclusion ; 
but as in the case of the human eye, my mind refuses to deny the Designer. 
The question is, how the two points can best be reconciled. I cannot do it 
except by believing that the Deity in some way works wholly by means of laws 
impressed on matter, but which laws, nevertheless, produce those results we 
call “ designed.” The word “ design,” however, is scarcely the word we should 
use, although unfortunately we have no better expression. A watchmaker in 
making a watch simply puts his materials together, but the Deity does much 
more than that, and I cannot exclude the idea of the Creator behind every- 
thing. Paley, in giving the illustration of the watch, alludes to this, but still 
he does not go very far. He says : “ You admit a designer, but if the watch 
produced another watch like itself would not that enhance your idea of the 
designer V’ Certainly it would, but Paley stops there. Now I would go still 
further, and say, Would not your idea of the designer be enhanced to a much 
greater extent if every watch and clock in the world, in all their wide diversity 
of shape and size and internal arrangement, had been evolved from one simple 
watch ? That would make the wonder infinitely greater, and yet it only 
brings us to the state of things which we find in nature. But Darwin says 
this is all brought about by chance. Now I should like some astute mathe- 
matician to calculate this matter of chance, and I am sure he would soon 
show the utter impossibility of the various correlations of growth which Mr. 
Row has referred to, all operating together to produce such perfect beings as 
we see simply by chance. The very perfection of all these arrangements is 
to me abundant evidence of a Designer. The doctrine of chance is the great 
crux of this theory. If that fails you must have some other doctrine, and 
you cannot accept any other except the principle of a Deity. I do not know 
how you can meet Darwin and his followers except by proving the utter 
impossibility of chance, and not some overruling power, having a hand in the 
matter. That is the only argument we can hold against them. It always 
seems to me useless to bring forward arguments from design. No doubt 
such arguments are very satisfactory to ourselves, but they are utterly thrown 
away against Mr. Darwin and those who think with him. (Cheers.) 
Mr. Reddie.— There is one thing which I may claim credit for, and that 
is the desire not to have a public discussion with Mr. Bradlaugh without a 
printed paper. When there is no printed paper, there is generally a host of 
questions raised in discussion which do not touch the subject at all. Even 
as it is, we have had Mr. Row, who is generally so shrewd a critic, so far 
wrong as to attribute to me the notion that the existence of this table is 
entirely ideal. Now you will find nothing whatever of that kind in my 
paper ; and in reference to what fell from Mr. Wainwright, I have already 
shown that to a certain extent he was only demolishing a man of straw 
