inutest details of organization
and habit.

It is to be observed here that in holding this doctrine of use and
adaptation in nature, the Bible is only consistent with its own theory
of rational theism. The Monotheist can not refer nature to a conflict
of antagonistic powers and forces. He must recognize in it a unity of
plan; and even those things which appear aberrant, irregular, or
noxious must have their place in this plan. Hence in the Bible God is
maker not only of the day but of the night, not only of the peaceful
cattle but of the voracious crocodile, not only of the sunshine and
shower but of the tornado and the earthquake. Further, in all these
things God is manifested, so that we may learn "his eternal power and
divinity[27] from the things which he has made," and in all these also
there are emblems of his relations to us. This argument from design is
in truth the only proof the Bible condescends to urge for the
existence of God; and it is the only one in which in his later days
our great English philosopher Mill could see any validity.[28]

If the reader happens to be familiar with the objections to the
doctrine of final causes, or teleology, in nature, urged in our day
by Spencer, Haeckel, and others, he will have seen from the foregoing
statements that these objections are in themselves baseless, or
inapplicable to this doctrine as maintained in the Bible. There is no
consistency in the position of men who, when they dig a rudely chipped
flint out of a bed of gravel, immediately infer an intelligent
workman, and who refuse to see any indication of a higher intelligence
in the creation of the workman himself. It is a blind philosophy which
professes to see in primal atoms the "promise and potency of mind,"
and which fails to perceive that such potency is more inconceivable
than the evidence of primary and supreme mind. The men who maintain
that wings were not planned for flight, but that flight has produced
wings, and thousands of like propositions, are simply amusing
themselves with paradoxes to which may very properly be applied the
strange word devised by Haeckel to express his theory of
nature--_Dysteleology_, or purposelessness. It is to be borne in mind,
however, that the teleology of the Bible is not of that narrow kind
which would make man the sole object of nature, and the supreme judge
of its adaptations. Inasmuch as God's plan goes over all the ages past
and future, and relates to the welfare of