Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/222

210 3. But the doctrine of natural selection is said to have destroyed the argument from design in Nature. This is a much more serious matter. For a Christian is bound to believe that Nature is the work of an all-wise and beneficent Creator, whom he also believes to be almighty, so that the Christian can not accept the view adopted by Mr. J. S. Mill, and make a division of labor or of territory between God and a power which limits and thwarts him. We propose to state the difficulty here as clearly and as strongly as we can, because we believe that it is the difficulty which presses most heavily upon thinking men at the present time. In the case of Mr. Darwin himself we notice that, while the substitution of derivation for special creation seems even to have strengthened his belief in the grandeur of creation, the substitution of natural selection for Paley's teleology cut away the main argument for believing in a God at all.

We are not surprised, then, to find those who are at least in imperfect sympathy with Christianity rejoicing in the discomfiture of the theologians. Mr. G. H. Lewes's pæan of triumph, in the "Fortnightly" of 1868, is perhaps the locus dassicus for this view. Prof. Huxley, with ill-concealed exultation, tells us that what struck him most forcibly on his first perusal of the "Origin of Species" was "the conviction that teleology, as commonly understood, had received its death-blow at Mr. Darwin's hands." Haeckel, in the same strain, says, "Wir erblicken darin den definitiven Tod aller teleologischen und vitalistischen Beurtheilung der Organismen"; and in his "History of Creation," "I maintain, with regard to the much-talked-of 'purpose in Nature,' that it really has no existence, but for those persons who observe phenomena in animals and plants in the most superficial manner."

From the insolent dogmatism of Haeckel, and the anti-theological animus of Lewes and Huxley, it is refreshing to turn to the cautious and reverent utterances of Charles Darwin. In his letters we are able to trace every stage through which he passed on this question. At Cambridge, circa 1830, he read carefully and with "much delight" Paley's "Evidences" and his "Natural Theology," and speaks of the reading of these books as the only part of the academical course which was of the least use in the education of his mind, but he "did not trouble about" Paley's premises—i. e., he took the existence of God as a personal being for granted. Later on, apparently between 1836 and 1839, though he still "did not think much about the existence of a personal God," he abandoned Paley's view, and never returned to it: