at "Darwinism
has conferred upon philosophy and religion an inestimable benefit by
shewing us that we must choose between two alternatives: either God is
everywhere present in Nature, or He is nowhere."[3] {103} So, again,
with Design. The earlier notion of the separate manufacture of species
and of special adaptations to particular ends had to give way to a
larger conception of the growth and gradual correlation of the parts
and functions of a stupendous whole. But for the attainment of this
mighty result direction and superintendence are even more imperatively
needed. As it was often urged with good reason, to make a world right
off would not have been so marvellous an achievement as to make that
world make itself.

The problem of Beneficence had, as we saw, come to be so entangled with
difficulties as to render it the most serious of all the problems which
pressed upon the minds and hearts of the men of this second stage of
thinking. But here, also, the fears which were at first aroused were
found to have been exaggerated; and perhaps it is true to say that
before the end of the century there was a general disposition to
conclude that with larger knowledge we should get to understand the
utility of much that to uninstructed eyes appears to be lavish waste
and needless suffering. The obvious fact that science could not go
forward without a loyal belief in the rational intelligibility of
nature gave justification to a corresponding belief in its ethical
intelligibility, even though in this case, as in the other, the {104}
complete proofs might not be immediately forthcoming. And there was,
further, the possibility--to some it was more than a possibility--that
much in the world which looks contrary to goodness is really to be
accounted for as the result of a misuse of liberty on the part of
powers and forces whose action has most mysteriously been allowed to
thwart and to complicate the task of the beneficent Maker of all.

About the _third stage_ it is fitting that we should speak with more
hesitation. We are living in it, and are as yet only at its beginning.
But we may hazard the prognostication that it will be both Religious
and Scientific; and that, "as knowledge grows from more to more," there
will be found the "more of reverence" of which our modern poet sings.
There is reason to hope that the bitterness of old controversies will
not be revived, and that we have before us a time in which Theology and
Sci