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I want to know where the so-called philosophical theories 
on which we are now touching differ from this black-flag 
declaration of war ? I look for some basis for those fundamental 
beliefs on which the family and property rest, and on which 
any idea of human responsibility to God may be based. Where 
is it ? All I am offered by the “ greatest thinker ” is this : 
The experience of ages has stamped on nerve and on brain the 
idea of a practical utility in such institutions; and human life, 
therefore, naturally moulds itself according to those impres- 
sions. Alas ! and has great thinking come to this most 
contemptible issue ? Is there, then, no eternal justice ? Is 
our sweet idea of unsullied chastity and delicate purity in the 
fairest of our race nothing more than a notion of utility 
generated gradually by some process of evolution in some 
shameless ape developed into a creature which wears a more 
graceful mask ? One cannot trust oneself to speak as one 
feels of these notions, which strike the crown from the head of 
the human race. But, in pursuance of my present object, I 
ask what will be the consequetice of any diffusion of them, 
however partial, amongst our youth of either sex, or of higher 
or lower social rank ? It is simply ruin, — moral, social, then 
political. A world without God is simply hell ! I can but 
echo the language of the illustrious Professor Max Muller in 
his recent lectures on language and thought directed against 
these evolution theories, when he said that they raise “ pro- 
blems which hang like storm-clouds over our heads, and make 
our very souls to quiver.” 
I pass on to the second principle, or, rather, no principle, 
on which all these Pantheistic or Atheistic theories rest — the 
denial of Final Causes ; or, at least, the rebuke administered, 
with what seems always to me serio-comic gravity, to any one 
who shall presume to assign any purpose or object of God in 
His creative arrangements. It used to be thought an exercise 
of the simplest common sense to take the eye, with its delicate 
optical adjustment, on the one hand, and to take the properties 
of light on the other, and noting their marvellous mutual 
relations, to conclude that the one was intended by wisdom 
and purpose aforethought to be acted on by the other. The 
very clown who moves the pump-handle, and notes that water 
follows the stroke, was capable of such a deduction ; and we 
thought he rightly assumed that the pump was made to draw 
water, and that any chance post inserted in the ground was by 
no means an accidentally less-developed brother to the pump- 
tree. That wise old heathen, Socrates, asked of one of the 
sceptics of his day, “ Thinkest thou not that He who made 
men gave them for their use each organ of sense ? Eyes to 
