boldly follow up the stream to its fountain, and allege a single primeval living seed as the origin of all living things, and that this must have been a microscopic animalcule, or plant spore, of the very lowest order, which, multiplying its kind, gave birth to improved and enlarged offspring; and they, in their turn, grew, and multiplied, and differentiated into varieties; and so, in the course of endless ages, the poorer sorts perishing and the better sorts prospering, the world became filled with its existing populations, without any new creative acts of God, and without any particular providential care over the new species.

The particular process according to which this multiplication and improvement took place, Mr. Darwin calls Natural Selection. Every creature tends to increase and multiply; and the very slowest breeders would soon fill the earth, were their multiplication not checked by hunger, by the attacks of enemies, and by the struggle for existence. But all are not born alike strong, or swift, or of the same color; some of the same brood are better fitted to escape enemies, or to fight the battle of life, than others. These will survive, while the weak ones perish. This Mr. Wallace calls, the survival of the fittest. They will transmit their superior size, or swiftness, or better color, or whatever superiority they possess, to their offspring. The process will go on in successive generations, each adding an infinitesimal quantity to the stock gained by the past generation; just as breeders of improved stock increase the weight of cattle by breeding from the largest; or breeders of race-horses increase the speed by breeding from the swiftest. In this way varieties from the same family will grow into different species. And, as only those differences which are beneficial to the animal are preserved, they will grow into improved species; and, as variations of all sorts take place, so all sorts of varieties and species arise in process of time. All will thus tend to perfect

themselves according to the laws of nature, and without any special oversight or care of God, or of anybody but Natural Selection; which Mr. Darwin takes special care to describe as an unintelligent selector. He defines the nature which selects to be "the aggregate action and product of natural laws," and these laws are "the sequences of events as ascertained by us." He ridicules the idea of God's special endowment of the fantail pigeon with additional feathers, or of the bull dog's jaws with strength, and says, "But if we give up the principle in the one case, if we do not admit that the variations of the primeval dog were intentionally guided in order, for instance, that the greyhound, that perfect image of symmetry and vigor, might be formed; no shadow of reason can be assigned for the belief that variations alike in nature, and the results of the same general laws which have been the groundwork through Natural Selection of the most perfectly adapted animals in the world, man included, were intentionally and specially guided."* This, then, is the grand distinctive difference of Mr. Darwin's mode of producing the various animals; namely, that it is unintelligent, their variations are not designed nor intended by the Creator, but they are the results of a method of trial and error, producing a hitand-miss pattern. The failures all perish, and the successes live and prosper; but there is no intentional or special guidance of God in the business. And the business includes the whole process of peopling the globe, from the creation of the first four or five germs down to the last formation of human society. God is thus dismissed from the greatest part of the world's life, including all human affairs. This is not exactly atheism in theory, but practically it amounts to much the same thing.

It is this excommunication of God's agency from the

*The Variations of Animals, etc., Vol. II. page 515.

management of the world, and especially from human affairs, by Mr. Darwin's method, which has so commended his books to the ungodly world. There is a general agreement among this class of writers, that Mr. Darwin has destroyed the basis of the argument for the being of God from design as displayed in the adaptations of birds and beasts to their conditions. Mr. Huxley says that "when he first read Mr. Darwin's book, what struck him most forcibly was the conviction that teleology, as commonly understood, had received its death blow at Mr. Darwin's hands."* "For the notion that every organism has been created as it is, and launched straight at a purpose, Mr. Darwin substitutes the conception of something which may fairly be termed a method of trial and error. Organisms vary incessantly; of these variations the few meet with surrounding conditions which suit them and thrive; the many are unsuited and become extinguished. * * * For the teleologist (the Christian) an organism exists, because it was made for the conditions in which it was found. For the Darwinian an organism exists, because out of many of its kind it is the only one which has been able to persist in the conditions in which it was found. *** If we apprehend the spirit of the Origin of Species rightly, then nothing can be more entirely and absolutely opposed to teleology, as it is commonly understood, than the Darwinian theory." Prof. Haeckel argues to the same purpose that Darwin's theory leads inevitably to Atheism and Materialism. Dr. Buchner says of Darwin's theory, "It is the most thoroughly naturalistic that can be imagined, and far more atheistic than that of his decried predecessor, Lamarck." Carl Vogt also commends it because "It turns the Creator, and his occasional intervention in the revolution of the earth and in the production of species, without any

*Lay Sermons, p. 30.

+Lay Sermons, 303.

hesitation out of doors, inasmuch as it does not leave the smallest room for the agency of such a Being. The first living germ being granted, out of it the creation develops itself progressively by Natural Selection, through all the geologic periods of our planet, by the simple law of descent. No new species arise by creation, and none perishes by annihilation; the natural cause of things, the process of evolution of all organisms, and of the earth itself, is of itself sufficient for the production of all we see. Thus man is not a special creation, produced in a different way, and distinct from other animals, endowed with an individual soul, and animated by the breath of God; on the contrary, man is only the highest product of the progressive evolution of animal life, springing from the group of apes next below him."*

Whether, therefore, Mr. Darwin himself intends his theory to be atheistic or not, it has had the misfortune to be so viewed by the greater number of its supporters; and, accordingly, it is this view of it which we shall keep prominent in the following discussion. Mr. Darwin does undoubtedly intend his theory to be antagonistic to the Bible account of creation and providence, and an improvement upon it; and, whether atheistic or not, it is undoubtedly anti-Christian.

I. The History of the Theory.

The first thing which strikes a common person on first hearing this theory is that it is a very queer notion for any Christian man to invent. We are naturally curious to know how a man, educated in a Christian country, could have fallen into it. But it is, in fact, no new discovery, but an old heathen superstition. Some four hundred years before Christ, when the world had almost wholly apostatized

*Cited by Hodge in "What is Darwinism?" Page 73, etc.

into idolatry, Democritus, among the Greeks, became of fended with the vulgar heathen gods, and set himself to invent a plan of the world without them. From Eastern travelers the Greeks knew that the Brahmins, in India, had a theory of the world developing itself from a primeval egg. He set himself to refine upon it, and imagined virtually the Nebular Hypothesis. He said that all matter consisted of very small atoms, dancing about in all directions, from all eternity, and which at last happened into the various forms of the present world.

The ancient Phoenicians held a theory that all life was from the sea; and that, as the wet mud produces all sorts of herbs in spring now, so originally it produced all manner of animals. They worshiped it as a god, and called it Mot, or Mud. Anaximander took up the theory and carried it out in true Darwinian style, alleging that the first men sprang from the ground watered by the sea, and that they had spines like sea urchins; evidently deriving them from the Radiates. Lucretius still further developed the theory in a poem in six books. The spread of Christianity, however, hindered the spread of the doctrine, as Mr. Tyndall feelingly laments, until the Saracens overspread the East, when some of them, it seems, favored it. But it seems to be an unlucky dogma, since, with the downfall of the power of the false prophet, the anti-Christian form of science went down again.

The dogma of the transmutation of species reappeared, however, in the Romish Church in a religious form; the old heathenism, which had never been wholly banished from the minds of men, thus reasserting itself. About the tenth century some began to teach that the bread of the communion of the Lord's Supper was transubstantiated, and the wine also, into the body, and blood, and soul, and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is probably the most complete transmutation of species which has ever been