d all terms distinctly implying infirmity or
limitation.

Now, Mr. Darwin speaks as if all who believe in the Almighty were compelled
to accept as really applicable to the Deity conceptions which affirm limits
and imperfections. Thus he says: "Can it be reasonably maintained that the
Creator intentionally ordered" "that certain fragments of rock should
assume certain shapes, so that the builder might erect his edifice?"

Why, surely every theist must maintain that in the first foundation of the
universe--the primary and absolute creation--God saw and knew every purpose
which every atom and particle of matter should ever subserve in all suns
and systems, and throughout all coming aeons of time. It is almost
incredible, but nevertheless it seems necessary to think that the
difficulty thus proposed rests on a sort of notion that amidst the
boundless profusion of nature there is too much for God to superintend;
that the number of objects is too great for an infinite and {259}
_omnipresent_ being to attend singly to each and all in their due
proportions and needs! In the same way Mr. Darwin asks whether God can have
ordered the race variations referred to in the passage last quoted, for the
considerations therein mentioned. To this it may be at once replied that
even man often has _several_ distinct intentions and motives for a _single_
action, and the theist has no difficulty in supposing that, out of an
infinite number of motives, the motive mentioned in each case may have been
an exceedingly subordinate one. The theist, though properly attributing to
God what, for want of a better term, he calls "purpose" and "design," yet
affirms that the limitations of human purposes and motives are by no means
applicable to the Divine "purposes." Out of many, say a thousand million,
reasons for the institution of the laws of the physical universe, some few
are to a certain extent conceivable by us; and amongst these the benefits,
material and moral, accruing from them to men, and to each individual man
in every circumstance of his life, play a certain, perhaps a very
subordinate, part.[263] As Baden Powell observes, "How can we {260}
undertake to affirm, amid all the possibilities of things of which we
confessedly know so little, that a thousand ends and purposes may not be
answered, because we can trace none, or even imagine none, which seem to
our short-sighted faculties to be answered in these particular
arrangemen