ay the skin.

By a similarly narrow and incomplete view the assertion that human
conceptions, such as "the vertebrate idea," &c., are ideas in the mind of
God, is sometimes ridiculed; as if the assertors either on the one {257}
hand pretended to some prodigious acuteness of mind--a far-reaching genius
not possessed by most naturalists--or, on the other hand, as if they
detected in the very phenomena furnishing such special conception evidences
of Divine imaginings. But let the idea of God, according to the highest
conceptions of Christianity, be once accepted, and then it becomes simply a
truism to say that the mind of the Deity contains all that is _good_ and
_positive_ in the mind of man, _plus_, of course, an absolutely
inconceivable infinity beyond. That thus such human conceptions may, nay
must, be asserted to be at the same time ideas in the Divine mind also, as
every real and separate individual that has been, is, or shall be, is
present to the same mind. Nay, more, that such human conceptions are but
faint and obscure adumbrations of corresponding ideas which exist in the
mind of God in perfection and fulness.[262]

The theist, having arrived at his theistic convictions from quite other
sources than a consideration of zoological or botanical phenomena, {258}
returns to the consideration of such phenomena and views them in a theistic
light without of course asserting or implying that such light has been
derived _from them_, or that there is an obligation of reason so to view
them on the part of others who refuse to enter upon or to accept those
other sources whence have been derived the theistic convictions of the
theist.

But Mr. Darwin is not guilty of arguing against metaphysical ideas on
physical grounds only, for he employs very distinctly metaphysical ones;
namely, his conceptions of the nature and attributes of the First Cause.
But what conceptions does he offer us? Nothing but that low
anthropomorphism which, unfortunately, he so often seems to treat as the
necessary result of Theism. It is again the dummy, helpless and deformed,
set up merely for the purpose of being knocked down.

It must once more be insisted on, that though man is indeed compelled to
conceive of God in human terms, and to speak of Him by epithets objectively
false, from their hopeless inadequacy, yet nevertheless the Christian
thinker declares that inadequacy in the strongest manner, and vehemently
rejects from his idea of Go