about the
date of beginning, or rate of progress.[15] All which are necessary to
be known in order to the formation of a correct theory. Again and again,
when confronted with facts which his theory can not explain, he takes
refuge in confessions of ignorance. When he meets facts which flatly
contradict his theory of the imperceptible beneficial acquirement of
organs, or of properties by inheritance--such as the sterility of
hybrids, the instincts of neuter bees, the battery of the electric eel,
the human eye, and the eye of the cuttle-fish, he owns that "_it is
impossible to conceive_ by what steps these wondrous organs have been
produced." When asked for the missing links between existing species, he
refers us to the undiscovered fossiliferous strata below the Silurian.
So Sir C. Lyell refers us for a view of the apes, which developed the
first men, to the unexplored geological regions of Central Africa! And
Rev. Baden Powell refers us, for the missing links of the chain of
development, to "that enormous period of which we are, from the
conditions, _precluded from knowing any thing whatever_." And as to the
Origin of Species, the very thing the title of his book proclaims, and
how the original germs varied into the four or five primeval forms, and
these into the next, he says: "_Our ignorance of the laws of variation
is profound!_" And that is science!

The Christian acknowledges his ignorance of the method of creation; but
he presents a sufficient cause for the existence of the facts. The
evolutionist ridicules the Bible account of creation as
incomprehensible, and then he gives us an account which he himself owns
to be incomprehensible, and which we, besides, perceive to be absurd. He
proposes to explain to us the origin of species, and locates it in the
geological strata of an unexplored continent, and in those remote ages
of which by the conditions _we are precluded from knowing any thing
whatever_! Objecting to the idea of the God of the Bible, as a
self-existent, infinite, intelligent, omnipotent, good Spirit, because
of its unthinkability, Messrs. Spencer, Tyndall, and the rest assure us
of the eternal self existence of an intelligent cloud of gas, endowed
with all promises and potencies, of life and thought, as a simple and
intelligible substitute! Belief in God Almighty is only superstition,
but faith in Mr. Tyndall's gas-god is science. Mr. Spencer honestly
lands in the unknowable. Well, then, what science ha