ssion to hoodwink us on this matter
if you can, and that you are but doing your best to earn an honest
living."

We may fancy Paley as turning the tables upon us and as saying; "But you
too have admitted a designer--you too then must mean a designer with a
body and soul, who must be somewhere to be found in space, and who must
live in time. Where is this your designer? Can you show him more than I
can? Can you lay your finger on him and demonstrate him so that a child
shall see him and know him, and find what was heretofore an isolated idea
concerning him, combine itself instantaneously with the idea of the
designer, we will say, of the human foot, so that no power on earth shall
henceforth tear those two ideas asunder? Surely if you cannot do this,
you too are trifling with words, and abusing your own mind and that of
your reader. Where, then, is your designer of man? Who made him? And
where, again, is your designer of beasts and birds, of fishes and of
plants?"

Our answer is simple enough; it is that we can and do point to a living
tangible person with flesh, blood, eyes, nose, ears, organs, senses,
dimensions, who did of his own cunning after infinite proof of every kind
of hazard and experiment scheme out and fashion each organ of the human
body. This is the person whom we claim as the designer and artificer of
that body, and he is the one of all others the best fitted for the task
by his antecedents, and his practical knowledge of the requirements of
the case--for he is man himself.

Not man, the individual of any given generation, but man in the entirety
of his existence from the dawn of life onwards to the present moment. In
like manner we say that the designer of all organisms is so incorporate
with the organisms themselves--so lives, moves, and has its being in
those organisms, and is so one with them--they in it, and it in them--that
it is more consistent with reason and the common use of words to see the
designer of each living form in the living form itself, than to look for
its designer in some other place or person.

Thus we have a third alternative presented to us.

Mr. Charles Darwin and his followers deny design, as having any
appreciable share in the formation of organism at all.

Paley and the theologians insist on design, but upon a designer outside
the universe and the organism.

The third opinion is that suggested in the first instance and carried out
to a very high degree of deve