ned
without recourse to supernatural power. When Napoleon objected to
Laplace that divine design was omitted from his mechanical theory of the
universe, the French philosopher characteristically replied: "I had no
need of that hypothesis." And the same disposition prevails in other
departments of science. Darwin, for instance, undertakes to explain the
origin and development of man, physical, intellectual and moral, without
assuming any cause other than those which obtain wherever life exists.
God is being slowly but surely driven from the domain of intermediate
causes, and transformed into an ultimate cause, a mere figment of the
imagination. He is being banished from nature into that poetical region
inhabited by the gods of Polytheism, to keep company there with Jupiter
and Apollo and Neptune and Juno and Venus, and all the rest of that
glorious Pantheon. He no longer rules the actual life and struggle of
the world, but lives at peace with his old rivals in--

"The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans;
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts, to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm." *

* Tennyson: "Lucretius."

The essence of all this is admitted by the writer in the _Christian
World_; he admits the facts, but denies the inference. They show us
one of God's ways of hiding himself. Order prevails, but it is the
expression of God's will, and not a mere result of the working of
material forces. He operates by method, not by caprice, and hence the
unchanging stability of things. While doing nothing in particular, he
does everything in general. And this idea must be extended to human
history. God endows man with powers, and allows him freedom to employ
them as he will. But, strangely enough, God has a way of "ruling our
freedom," and always there is "a restraining and restoring hand."
How man's will can be free and yet overruled passes our merely carnal
understanding, although it may be intelligible enough to minds steeped
in the mysteries of theology. According to this writer, God's government
of mankind is a "constitutional kingdom." Quite so. It was once
arbitrary and despotic; now it is far milder and less exacting, having
dwindled into the "constitutional" stage, wherein the King _reigns_ but
does not _govern_. Will the law of human growth and divine decay stop
h