criticisms has
been recently made by one of the most strenuous defenders of orthodoxy.
No less eminent a standard-bearer of the faith than the Rev. Prof.
Zoeckler says of this movement to demonstrate creative purpose and
design, and of the men who took part in it, "The earth appeared in their
representation of it like a great clothing shop and soup kitchen, and
God as a glorified rationalistic professor." Such a statement as this
is far from just to the conceptions of such men as Butler, Paley,
and Chalmers, no matter how fully the thinking world has now outlived
them.(17)

(17) For a very valuable and interesting study on the old idea of the
generation of insects from carrion, see Osten-Sacken, on the Oxen-born
Bees of the Ancients, Heidelberg, 1894; for Ray, see the work cited,
London, 1827, p. 153; for Grew, see Cosmologia Sacra, or a Discourse on
the Universe, as it is the Creature and Kingdom of God; chiefly written
to demonstrate the Truth and Excellency of the Bible, by Dr. Nehemiah
Grew, Fellow of the College of Physicians and of the Royal Society of
London, 1701; for Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises, see the usual
editions; also Lange, History of Rationalism. Goethe's couplet ran as
follows:

"Welche Verehrung verdient der Weltenerschopfer, der Gnadig, Als er den
Korkbaum erschuf, gleich auch die Stopfel erfand."

For the quotation from Zoeckler, see his work already cited, vol. ii,
pp. 74, 440.

But, noble as the work of these men was, the foundation of fact on which
they reared it became evidently more and more insecure. For as far
back as the seventeenth century acute theologians had begun to discern
difficulties more serious than any that had before confronted them.
More and more it was seen that the number of different species was far
greater than the world had hitherto imagined. Greater and greater had
become the old difficulty in conceiving that, of these innumerable
species, each had been specially created by the Almighty hand; that each
had been brought before Adam by the Almighty to be named; and that each,
in couples or in sevens, had been gathered by Noah into the ark. But the
difficulties thus suggested were as nothing compared to those raised by
the DISTRIBUTION of animals.

Even in the first days of the Church this had aroused serious thought,
and above all in the great mind of St. Augustine. In his City of God he
had stated the difficulty as follows: "But there is a question a