century, the agnostic had an almost fatally easy case; he had but to
reject the revelation alleged to have been given once for all in the
dim past--to reject it on scientific or critical grounds--and who was
to prove to him that the universe had been created a few thousand years
ago by a remote and external Deity? As for him, he professed, and
professed candidly enough, that he could see nothing in nature but the
operation of impersonal forces; there was natural law, and there was
the process of evolution, but beyond these----? Now the only really
telling reply that can be made to those who argue in this fashion is
that which reasons from the Divine immanence as its _terminus a
quo_--the doctrine which beholds God first of all present and active
_in_ the world, and sees in natural law not a possible substitute for
Him, but the working of His sovereign Will. From this point of view,
the orderliness of the cosmos, {18} the uniformity and regularity of
nature, attest not the unconscious throbbing of a soulless engine, or a
blind Power behind phenomena, but a directing Mind, a prevailing Will.
The world, according to this conception, was not "made" once upon a
time, like a piece of clockwork, and wound up to run without further
assistance; it is not a mechanism, but an organism, thrilled and
pervaded by an eternal Energy that "worketh even until now." In Sir
Oliver Lodge's phrase, we must look for the action of Deity, if at all,
then always; and this thought of the indwelling God, revealing Himself
in the majestic course and order of nature, not only rebuts the
assaults of Agnosticism, but compels our worship. And as natural law
speaks to us of the steadfastness and prevailing power of the Divine
Will, so evolution speaks of the Divine Purpose, and proclaims that
purpose "somehow good," since evolution means a steady reaching forward
and upward, an unfolding and ascent from less to more.

We take a step higher up when we come to the further revelation of God
as seen dwelling in man; a step higher up because on any sane view
immanence is a fact admitting of very various degrees, so that God is
more fully revealed in the organic than in the inorganic world, more in
the conscious than in the unconscious, far more in man than in lower
creatures. We speak of God's indwelling in man in the {19} same sense
in which there is something of an earthly parent's very being in his
children; indeed, rightly considered, the Divine P