le of
natural selection, or the purposeless changes effected by unconscious
force, cannot apply; as for example, the distinction of sex, with all
that is therein involved. But passing by such cases, it may be asked,
what would it avail to get rid of design in the vegetable and animal
kingdom, while the whole universe is full of it? That this ordered
Cosmos is not from necessity or chance, is almost a self-evident fact.
Not one man in a million of those who ever heard of God, either does
doubt or can doubt it. Besides how are the cosmical relations of light,
heat, electricity, to the constituent parts of the universe, and
especially, so far as this earth is concerned, to vegetable and animal
life, to be accounted for? Is this all chance work? Is it by chance that
light and heat cause plants to carry on their wonderful operations,
transmuting the inorganic into the organic, dead matter into living and
life sustaining matter? Is it without a purpose that water instead of
contracting, expands at the freezing point?--a fact to which is due that
the earth north of the tropic is habitable for man or beast. It is no
answer to this question to say that a few other substances have the same
peculiarity, when no good end, that we can see, is thereby accomplished.
No man is so foolish as to deny that his eye was intended to enable him
to see, because he cannot tell what the spleen was made for. It is,
however, useless to dwell upon this subject. If a man denies that there
is design in nature, he can with quite as good reason deny that there is
any design in any or in all the works ever executed by man.

The conclusion of the whole matter is, that the denial of design in
nature is virtually the denial of God. Mr. Darwin's theory does deny all
design in nature, therefore, his theory is virtually atheistical; his
theory, not he himself. He believes in a Creator. But when that Creator,
millions on millions of ages ago, did something,--called matter and a
living germ into existence,--and then abandoned the universe to itself
to be controlled by chance and necessity, without any purpose on his
part as to the result, or any intervention or guidance, then He is
virtually consigned, so far as we are concerned, to non-existence. It
has already been said that the most extreme of Mr. Darwin's admirers
adopt and laud his theory, for the special reason that it banishes God
from the world; that it enables them to account for design without
referri