n to believe that both can be accounted for on natural grounds
without introducing a supernatural donor. The question whether
Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Bacon and Shakespeare came through a process
of spontaneous generation is excruciatingly ludicrous. That process
could only produce the very lowest form of organism, and not a
wonderfully complex being like man who is the product of an incalculable
evolution. But the Archbishop did not perhaps intend this; it may be
that in his haste to silence the "infidel" he stumbled over his own
meaning. Lastly, there is a remarkable naivete in the aside of the final
question--"for they are minds." He should have added "you know," and
then the episode would have been delightfully complete. The assumption
of the whole point at issue in an innocent parenthesis is perhaps to be
expected from a pulpiteer, but it is not likely that the "infidel"
will be caught by such a simple stratagem. All these questions are so
irrelevant and absurd that we doubt whether his Grace would have the
courage to put one of them to any sceptic across a table, or indeed from
any place in the world except the pulpit, which is beyond all risk of
attack, and whence a man may ask any number of questions without the
least fear of hearing one of them answered.

The invitation given by his grace, to "descend to the harder ground
of strictest logical argumentation," is very appropriate. Whether
the movement be ascending or descending, there is undoubtedly a vast
distance between logical argumentation and anything he has yet advanced.
But even on the "harder" ground the Archbishop treads no more firmly.
He demands to know how the original protoplasm became endowed with life,
and if that question cannot be answered he calls upon us to admit
his theory of divine agency, as though that made the subject more
intelligible. Supernatural hypotheses are but refuges of ignorance.
Earl Beaconsfield, in his impish way, once remarked that where knowledge
ended religion began, and the Archbishop of Canterbury seems to share
that opinion. His Grace also avers that "no one has ever yet been able
to refute the argument necessitating a great First Cause." It is very
easy to assert this, but rather difficult to maintain it. One assertion
is as good as another, and we shall therefore content ourselves with
saying that in our opinion the argument for a great First Cause was (to
mention only one name) completely demolished by John Stuart