nction. Divine wisdom! Anything nearer complete stupidity and
futility it would be difficult to conceive.

I know that at this point it will be said that I am leaving out of
account the future life, and that the story of human growth is to be
continued elsewhere. But that will certainly not meet all that has been
said above. And it is a curious manner of meeting an objection based
upon the only phase of existence that we know with assurance to tell us
that our indictment will receive a complete refutation in another state
of existence of which we know nothing at all. The reply is in itself an
admission of the truth of the charges. If life admitted of a moral
justification here there would be no need to appeal to some other life
in which these blemishes are made good. If some other life is needed to
correct the moral abnormalities of this one, then the indictment of the
Atheist is justified. And one is left again wondering why, if almighty
intelligence could make all things straight in the next world, why the
same intelligence could not have made the necessary corrections in this
one.

The truth is that the God of the evolutionary process is as much a myth
as is the god of special creation. He has all the blemishes of the other
one--one step removed. The Paleyan God had at least the merit of coming
to close grips with his work. The evolutionary one shields himself
behind the fact that the work is done by his agents, and then it is
found that he created the agents for this special work and all that they
do is the product of the qualities with which he endowed them. If
anything the evolutionary deity is more objectionable than the older
one. And if theists will examine nature candidly and with an open mind,
they will see that it is so. I do not know that anyone has drawn a more
truthful picture of natural processes as they appear from the point of
view of being the product of a divine intelligence than has Mr. W. H.
Mallock, and his picture is the more deadly as coming from a champion of
theism. If, he says, theists will look the facts of the universe
steadily in the face:

What they will see will astonish them. They will see that if there
is anything at the back of this vast process, with a consciousness
and a purpose in any way resembling our own--a being who knows what
he wants and is doing his best to get it--he is instead of a holy
and all-wise God, a scatter-brained, semi-powerful, semi-i