Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/228

 which mean suffering* and pain for all, without even a compensating "survival of the fittest" or improvement of the race!

To sum up thus far. One who believes, in the God of Christianity is bound to believe that creation is his work from end to end, that it is a rational work and the work of a being who is wholly good. He is bound to believe that "God's mercy is over all his works," that "not a sparrow falls to the ground" without his knowledge, that there are design and purpose everywhere. But he is not bound to know or to say that he knows what that purpose is, or to show that marks of beneficence are everywhere apparent. Still less is he bound to assert, as the old teleology did, that he can demonstrate the wisdom and goodness of God from Nature alone. Evolution starts with an "act of faith," a postulate of our rational nature—viz., that everything is rational and has a meaning, even that which is at present irreducible to law. In this belief much which was once meaningless becomes intelligible, and a scientific man's faith is not staggered by the fact that much as yet remains outside, which science has not explained. On the moral side also we start with an "act of faith," a postulate of our moral nature, that God is good and can not be the cause of meaningless and unnecessary pain. And our faith is not staggered by much which seems, as yet, like useless suffering. Even if Darwin's mature judgment that on the whole "happiness decidedly prevails" were not true, we should still believe in the goodness of God, in spite of all that seems to contradict it, and look forward to the time when our children, or our children's children, will see clearly what to us is dim or dark.—The Guardian.



INETY thousand Americans go abroad every summer. Among this army there must be many readers of this magazine, who are interested not only in art but in science; who find time to wonder, as they toil up to the top of Cologne Cathedral, what the stone is that sustains so mighty a mass, and whence come the crystals that now and again flash from the walls; who, as their eye roams over the vast expanse seen from above, let their imagination roam into the past when the Rhine had not yet won from the sea the provinces over which it now meanders. The artist finds guide-books crammed with catalogues of museums containing works of man and critical notices of the same, and man's battle-fields and burial-places are noted. Yet the collections of natural wonders are so curtly mentioned 