of writing the sentence.  That is just what machines and organisms are for; and a consistent Christian theist should maintain that is what all matter is for.  Finally, if, as we freely suppose, he means none of these, he must mean (unless we are much mistaken) that organisms originated by the Almighty Creator could not be endowed with the power of producing similar organisms, or slightly dissimilar organisms, without successive interventions.  Then he begs the very question in dispute, and that, too, in the face of the primal command, “Be fruitful and multiply,” and its consequences in every natural birth.  If the actual facts could be ignored, how nicely the parallel would run!  “The idea involves a contradiction.”  For an animal to make an animal, or a plant to make a plant, supposes it to select carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, to combine these into cellulose and protoplasm, to join with these some phosphorus, lime, etc., to build them into structures and usefully-adjusted organs.  A man who can believe that plants and animals can do this (not, indeed, in the crude way suggested, but in the appointed way) “might as well believe in God.”  Yes, verily, and so he probably will, in spite of all that atheistical philosophers have to offer, if not harassed and confused by such arguments and statements as these.

There is a long line of gradually-increasing divergence from the ultra-orthodox view of Dr. Hodge through those of such men as Sir William Thomson, Herschel, Argyll, Owen, Mivart, Wallace, and Darwin, down to those of Strauss, Vogt, and Buchner.  To strike the line with telling power and good effect, it is necessary to aim at the right place.  Excellent as the present volume is in motive and clearly as it shows that Darwinism may bear an atheistic as well as a theistic interpretation, we fear that it will not contribute much to the reconcilement of science and religion.

The length of the analysis of the first book on our list precludes the notices which we intended to take of the three others.  They are all the production of men who are both scientific and religious, one of them a celebrated divine and writer unusually versed in natural history.  They all look upon theories of evolution either as in the way of being established or as not unlikely to prevail, and they confidently expect to lose thereby no solid ground for theism or religion.  Mr. St. Clair, a new writer, in his “Darwinism and Design; or, Creation by Evolution,” takes his ground in the following succinct statement of his preface: 

“It is being assumed by our scientific guides that the design-argument has been driven out of the field by the doctrine of evolution.  It seems to be thought by our theological teachers that the best defense of the faith is to deny evolution in toto, and denounce it as anti-Biblical.  My volume endeavors to show that, if evolution be true, all is not lost; but, on the contrary, something is gained:  the design-argument remains unshaken, and the wisdom and beneficence of God receive new illustration.”