species"; equally present on both sides of
every strain, in all pressures and in all resistances, in short in
the general wonder of life and the world. And this is exactly what the
Divine Power must be for religious faith.
The point I wish once more to make is that the necessary readjustment of
teleology, so as to make it depend upon the contemplation of the whole
instead of a part, is advantageous quite as much to theology as to
science. For the older view failed in courage. Here again our theism was
not sufficiently theistic.
Where results seemed inevitable, it dared not claim them as God-given.
In the argument from Design it spoke not of God in the sense of
theology, but of a Contriver, immensely, not infinitely wise and good,
working within a world, the scene, rather than the ever dependent
outcome, of His Wisdom; working in such emergencies and opportunities
as occurred, by forces not altogether within His control, towards an end
beyond Himself. It gave us, instead of the awful reverence due to the
Cause of all substance and form, all love and wisdom, a dangerously
detached appreciation of an ingenuity and benevolence meritorious in aim
and often surprisingly successful in contrivance.
The old teleology was more useful to science than to religion, and the
design-naturalists ought to be gratefully remembered by Biologists.
Their search for evidences led them to an eager study of adaptations
and of minute forms, a study such as we have now an incentive to in the
theory of Natural Selection. One hardly meets with the same ardour in
microscopical research until we come to modern workers. But the argument
from Design was never of great importance to faith. Still, to rid it of
this character was worth all the stress and anxiety of the gallant old
war. If Darwin had done nothing else for us, we are to-day deeply in
his debt for this. The world is not less venerable to us now, not less
eloquent of the causing mind, rather much more eloquent and sacred.
But our wonder is not that "the underjaw of the swine works under the
ground" or in any or all of those particular adaptations which Paley
collected with so much skill, but that a purpose transcending, though
resembling, our own purposes, is everywhere manifest; that what we live
in is a whole, mutually sustaining, eventful and beautiful, where the
"dead" forces feed the energies of life, and life sustains a stranger
existence, able in some real measure to contemplate t
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