diversification.

Finally, we advise nobody to accept Darwin's, or any other derivative
theory, as true. The time has not come for that, and perhaps never
will. We also advise against a similar credulity on the other side, in
a blind faith that species--that the manifold sorts and forms of
existing animals and vegetables--"have no secondary cause." The
contrary is already not unlikely, and we suppose will hereafter become
more and more probable. But we are confident, that, if a derivative
hypothesis ever is established, it will be so on a solid theistic
ground.

Meanwhile an inevitable and legitimate hypothesis is on trial,--an
hypothesis thus far not untenable,--a trial just now very useful to
science, and, we conclude, not harmful to religion, unless injudicious
assailants temporarily make it so.

One good effect is already manifest: its enabling the advocates of the
hypothesis of a multiplicity of human species to perceive the double
insecurity of their ground. When the races of men are admitted to be
of one species, the corollary, that they are of one origin, may be
expected to follow. Those who allow them to be of one species must
admit an actual diversification into strongly marked and persistent
varieties, and so admit the basis of fact upon which the Darwinian
hypothesis is built; while those, on the other hand, who recognize a
diversity of human species, will hardly be able to maintain that such
species were primordial and supernatural in the common sense of the
word.

The English mind is prone to positivism and kindred forms of
materialistic philosophy, and we must expect the derivative theory to
be taken up in that interest. We have no predilection for that school,
but the contrary. If we had, we might have looked complacently upon a
line of criticism which would indirectly, but effectively, play into
the hands of positivists and materialistic atheists generally. The
wiser and stronger ground to take is, that the derivative hypothesis
leaves the argument for design, and therefore for a Designer, as valid
as it ever was;--that to do any work by an instrument must require,
and therefore presuppose, the exertion rather of more than of less
power than to do it directly;--that whoever would be a consistent
theist should believe that Design in the natural world is coextensive
with Providence, and hold fully to the one as he does to the other, in
spite of the wholly similar and apparently insuperable difficul