l throughout, the chief thoughts of the
time were intensely occupied with {99} the greatest of all questions,
those about GOD AND THE WORLD. And, further, it has not been difficult
to perceive that there have been three distinct stages in the sequence
of these thoughts.

In the _first stage_ we can see, as we look back, that the Religious
feeling was dominant, while the scientific temper could scarcely have
been said to exist; certainly it did not exist upon any extended scale.
But, though the desire to be reverent was widespread, we are bound to
allow that the ideas about God were somewhat crudely conceived. As a
legacy, no doubt, from the Deistic controversies of the preceding
century, the general thought did not rise above the notion of a Supreme
Mechanist and all-powerful Ruler of all things. The Divine Being was
regarded as having originated the universe by a fiat of His will,
fashioning its several contents one after another as He pleased, and
appointing that each and all should be subjected to the laws He had
ordained; always reserving to Himself the right to intervene by some
signal display of wisdom and power, when such intervention was
required, either to remedy a defect, or yet further to set forth His
glory. Men were very ready to admit the idea of the Supernatural, but
it was in the merely superficial and popular sense of _power working
without means_, rather than what we now {100} feel to be the far truer
sense of _superhuman knowledge of means, and power to use them_.[1] It
followed, and this was the weakest point in the Paleyan system of
Natural Theology, that God's action was looked for not in the normal,
but in the exceptional processes of Nature. The need of the Divine was
only felt when no other explanation was forthcoming; with the result,
of course, that as other explanations were found, the necessity for
recognising its operation grew ever less and less. And, even apart
from such a consequence, the effects of the conception could not be
otherwise than injurious to religious faith; for, as it has been truly
and reverently observed, "a theory of occasional intervention implies
as its correlative a theory of ordinary absence."[2]

As to knowledge of the World, there was scarcely any at all, according
in our present understanding of such knowledge. Not everybody, of
course, accounted for the existence of fossils by supposing that they
were the casts from which the Almighty had designed His cr