Creation, until He seems to have no personal relations with it, 
but becomes a mere perspective point from which the lines, 
ultimately radiate. Or else they aim at obliterating Him 
wholly, and rejecting the idea of any plan or purpose such as 
a personal Will might impress on the Universe, and human 
searching might discover. These two falsities are — 1st, Evo- 
lution in the sense in which it is pressed as a universal law of 
mind and matter ; and 2nd, the denial of all final causes, at 
least as discoverable by man. 
We can but touch upon these here. They have been ably 
debated in many of our papers. We omit the attempts made 
with a marvellous ingenuity, based on an immense knowledge 
of natural history, to build up a system of animal development, 
whereby the wing of a bird, the flapper of a tortoise, and the 
arm of a man have been in the course of ages fashioned into 
their present forms out of one original rudiment to serve their 
present uses, and not consciously moulded by the Creator 
according to His knowledge of His creatures 5 necessities. 
And we only briefly notice the graver part of the theory which 
teaches that the moral sense in man, the conscience, the idea 
of responsibility, is produced gradually in like manner. It is 
merely the mechanical evolution whereby certain past impres- 
sions and experiences of many generations, being recognized 
as tolerably uniform in their occurrence, become printed on 
the nervous and brain organism of the race, and by further 
repetition and evolution attain higher developments in the 
more civilized races of man. * We have space for few quota- 
tions here, but we may give the words of Mr. Herbert Spencer, 
held by many of these advanced philosophers to be “ the 
greatest thinker of the age. 55 He says, “I believe [mark 
the word, and the creed and the credulity] that the ex- 
periences of utility, organized and consolidated through all 
past generations of the human race, have been producing 
corresponding modifications, which by continued transmission 
and accumulation have become in us certain moral faculties 
of moral intuition — certain emotions responding to unjust and 
wrong conduct, which have no apparent basis in the individual 
experience of utility •” That propensities and character are to 
a certain limited extent hereditary, and that different races of 
men have their special moral affinities, we all readily acknow- 
ledge. But again, I think, the statement of the theory will 
Suffice* These men may be “ great thinkers, 55 they may have 
* Darwin’s Descent of Man , vol. ii. pp. 390-2 ; vol. i. p. 73. Also 
Mr. Herbert Spencer. 
