r whether the process is
eternal, or how it began to be. Either it had a beginning or it had not;
if it had, creation out of nothing is conceded, and there is nothing
left to dispute. It is puerile to except to the _frequency_ of creative
acts on the ordinary hypothesis of specific origin, because it is freely
open to science to reduce the several 'kinds' to the lowest _minimum_ it
can experimentally establish. Moreover--besides the utter inconsequence
of such purely relative ideas as _often_ and _rare_--it is far more
reasonable that an eternal, personal author of creation should watch
over his work to shape and diversify it at his pleasure, than that,
after a single act, he should relapse into _inertia_ like the Hindu
Brahmin. To concentrate the whole evidence of design in one original
act, ages upon ages ago, with no opening for after interference,
undermines belief in a personal designer, simply because it leaves him
nothing to do."[4]

Leaving these brutish among the people who assert the latter, to the
enjoyment of their folly, let us ascertain what we can know of the great
Creator of the heavens and the earth. God refers the atheists of the
Psalmist's days to their own bodies for proofs of his intelligence, to
their own minds for proofs of his personality, and to their own
observation of the judgments of his providence against evil-doers for
proofs of his moral government. Our text ascribes for him perception and
intelligence: _He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that
formed the eye, shall he not see?_ It does not say, he has an eye or an
ear, but that he has the knowledge we acquire by those organs. And the
argument is from the designed organ to the designing maker of it, and is
perfectly irresistible. A blind god could not make a seeing man. Let us
look for a little at a few of the many marks of design in this organ to
which God thus refers us.

We shall first observe the mechanical skill displayed in the formation
of the eye, and then the optical arrangements, or rather a few of them,
for there are more than eight hundred distinct contrivances already
observed by anatomists in the dead eye, while the great contrivance of
all, the power of seeing, is utterly beyond their ken. I hold in my hand
a box made of several pieces of wood glued together, and covered on the
outside with leather. Inside it is lined with cotton, and the cotton has
a lining of fine white silk. You at once observe that it is inte