[180] man, had developed out of lower forms, and advanced thinkers had been reaching the conclusion that the universe, as we find it, is the result of a continuous process, unbroken by supernatural interference, and explicable by uniform natural laws.  But while the reign of law in the world of non-living matter seemed to be established, the world of life could be considered a field in which the theory of divine intervention is perfectly valid, so long as science failed to assign satisfactory causes for the origination of the various kinds of animals and plants.  The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 is, therefore, a landmark not only in science but in the war between science and theology.  When this book appeared, Bishop Wilberforce truly said that “the principle of natural selection is incompatible with the word of God,” and theologians in Germany and France as well as in England cried aloud against the threatened dethronement of the Deity.  The appearance of the Descent of Man (1871), in which the evidence for the pedigree of the human race from lower animals was marshalled with masterly force, renewed the outcry.  The Bible said that God created man in his own image, Darwin said that man descended from an ape.  The feelings of the orthodox world may be

[181] expressed in the words of Mr. Gladstone:  “Upon the grounds of what is called evolution God is relieved of the labour of creation, and in the name of unchangeable laws is discharged from governing the world.”  It was a discharge which, as Spencer observed, had begun with Newton’s discovery of gravitation.  If Darwin did not, as is now recognized, supply a complete explanation of the origin of species, his researches shattered the supernatural theory and confirmed the view to which many able thinkers had been led that development is continuous in the living as in the non-living world.  Another nail was driven into the coffin of Creation and the Fall of Adam, and the doctrine of redemption could only be rescued by making it independent of the Jewish fable on which it was founded.

Darwinism, as it is called, has had the larger effect of discrediting the theory of the adaptation of means to ends in nature by an external and infinitely powerful intelligence.  The inadequacy of the argument from design, as a proof of God’s existence, had been shown by the logic of Hume and Kant; but the observation of the life-processes of nature shows that the very analogy between nature and art, on which the argument depends, breaks down.  The impropriety of the analogy has been

[182] pointed out, in a telling way, by a German writer (Lange).  If a man wants to shoot a hare which is in a certain field, he does not procure thousands of guns, surround the field, and cause them all to be fired off; or if he wants a house to live in, he does not build a whole town and abandon to weather and decay all the houses but one.  If he did either of these things we should say he was mad or amazingly