ert our own old-fashioned notion boldly: and more; we will
say, in spite of ridicule--That if such a God exists, final causes must
exist also. That the whole universe must be one chain of final causes.
That if there be a Supreme Reason, he must have reason, and that a good
reason, for every physical phenomenon.

We will tell the modern scientific man--You are nervously afraid of the
mention of final causes. You quote against them Bacon's saying, that
they are barren virgins; that no physical fact was ever discovered or
explained by them. You are right: as far as regards yourselves. You
have no business with final causes; because final causes are moral
causes: and you are physical students only. We, the natural Theologians,
have business with them. Your duty is to find out the How of things:
ours, to find out the Why. If you rejoin that we shall never find out
the Why, unless we first learn something of the How, we shall not deny
that. It may be most useful, I had almost said necessary, that the
clergy should have some scientific training. It may be most useful--I
sometimes dream of a day when it will be considered necessary--that every
candidate for Ordination should be required to have passed creditably in
at least one branch of physical science, if it be only to teach him the
method of sound scientific thought. But our having learnt the How, will
not make it needless, much less impossible, for us to study the Why. It
will merely make more clear to us the things of which we have to study
the Why; and enable us to keep the How and the Why more religiously apart
from each other.

But if it be said--After all, there is no Why. The doctrine of
evolution, by doing away with the theory of creation, does away with that
of final causes,--Let us answer boldly,--Not in the least. We might
accept all that Mr Darwin, all that Professor Huxley, all that other most
able men, have so learnedly and so acutely written on physical science,
and yet preserve our natural Theology on exactly the same basis as that
on which Butler and Paley left it. That we should have to develop it, I
do not deny. That we should have to relinquish it, I do.

Let me press this thought earnestly on you. I know that many wiser and
better men than I have fears on this point. I cannot share in them.

All, it seems to me, that the new doctrines of evolution demand is
this:--We all agree--for the fact is patent--that our own bodies, and
indeed