. Yes: we answer
to the first question very lightly but without perhaps always thinking
what that affirmative answer implies, a point to be considered in a
moment. It may at once be said that we do now know a good deal about
the laws under which inheritance works itself out, and that knowledge,
as most people are now aware, is due to the quiet and for a time
forgotten labours of Johann Gregor Mendel, once Abbot of the Augustinian
Abbey of Bruenn, a prelate of that Church which loud-voiced ignoramuses
are never tired of proclaiming to have been from the beginning even down
to the present day the impassioned and deadly enemy of all scientific
progress. Mendel saw that former workers at inheritance had been
directing their attention to the _tout ensemble_ of an individual or
natural object; his idea was analytical in its nature, for he directed
his attention to individual characteristics, such as stature or colour,
or the like. And having thus directed his attention and confined his
labours mainly to plants, since the study of generations of most animals
is too lengthy a process for one man to carry out, he did in fact
discover that there are very definite laws, capable even of numerical
statement, under which inheritance acts. There is no need to explain or
discuss them here: suffice it to say that there _are_ such laws,[34] as
is now admitted by an overwhelming majority of the biologists of to-day.
Mendel's facts were hidden in a somewhat obscure journal; they lay
dormant, much to his annoyance, during his lifetime. Years after his
death his papers were unearthed, and his discoveries have been
proclaimed as being as fundamental to biology as those of Newton and
Dalton to other sciences.

There are, then, laws. That means one of two things: either that these
laws arose by chance-medley, or that some one enacted them. It seems
impossible, when one surveys the orderly operations of Nature, among
which are those conducted under the laws known by the name of their
discoverer, Mendel--it seems wholly impossible that these operations
arose by chance-medley. To me, at any rate, any such explanation is
wholly unthinkable. But if it be an impossible explanation, as I and
many thousands, not to say millions, of other persons believe, then
there is no other way out of it than that these operations must have
been planned by some one; in other words, that there must have been a
Creator and Deviser of the world.

People hide from thi