w of creation; it was an
example of intellectual honesty arriving at errors, but thereby aiding
the advent of truths. Crippled though Descartes was by his almost
morbid fear of the Church, this part of his work was no small factor
in bringing in that attitude of mind which led to a reception of the
thoughts of more unfettered thinkers.

Thirty years later came, in England, an effort of a different sort, but
with a similar result. In 1678 Ralph Cudworth published his Intellectual
System of the Universe. To this day he remains, in breadth of
scholarship, in strength of thought, in tolerance, and in honesty, one
of the greatest glories of the English Church, and his work was
worthy of him. He purposed to build a fortress which should protect
Christianity against all dangerous theories of the universe, ancient
or modern. The foundations of the structure were laid with old thoughts
thrown often into new and striking forms; but, as the superstructure
arose more and more into view, while genius marked every part of it,
features appeared which gave the rigidly orthodox serious misgivings.
From the old theories of direct personal action on the universe by the
Almighty he broke utterly. He dwelt on the action of law, rejected the
continuous exercise of miraculous intervention, pointed out the fact
that in the natural world there are "errors" and "bungles," and argued
vigorously in favour of the origin and maintenance of the universe as
a slow and gradual development of Nature in obedience to an inward
principle. The Balaks of seventeenth-century orthodoxy might well
condemn this honest Balaam.

Toward the end of the next century a still more profound genius,
Immanuel Kant, presented the nebular theory, giving it, in the light of
Newton's great utterances, a consistency which it never before had; and
about the same time Laplace gave it yet greater strength by mathematical
reasonings of wonderful power and extent, thus implanting firmly in
modern thought the idea that our own solar system and others--suns,
planets, satellites, and their various movements, distances, and
magnitudes--necessarily result from the obedience of nebulous masses to
natural laws.

Throughout the theological world there was an outcry at once against
"atheism," and war raged fiercely. Herschel and others pointed out
many nebulous patches apparently gaseous. They showed by physical and
mathematical demonstrations that the hypothesis accounted for the great