r than the present. We must
content ourselves with a few citations from the discussion on a paper in
favor of the credibility of Darwinism,[36] and another in favor of the
doctrine of evolution.[37] In summing up the debates on these two
topics, the chairman, Rev. Walter Mitchell, presented with great
clearness and force his reasons for regarding Darwinism as incredible
and impossible. In his protracted remarks he contrasts the Scriptural
doctrine, that of the Vestiges of Creation, and that of Darwin on the
origin of species. He thus states the doctrine of the Bible on the
subject: "If," he says, "science be another name for real knowledge; if
science be the pursuit of sound wisdom; if science be the pursuit of
truth itself; I say that man has no right to reject anything that is
true because it savors of God. Well, what is this hypothesis--older than
that of Darwin--which does, and does alone, account for all the observed
facts, or all that which we can read, recorded in the book of Nature? It
is, that God created all things very good; that He made every vegetable
after its own kind; that He made every animal after its own kind; that
He allowed certain laws of variation, but that He has ordained strict,
though invisible and invincible barriers, which prevent that variation
from running riot, and which includes it within strict and well defined
limits. This is a hypothesis which will account for all that we have
learnt from the works of Nature. It admits an intelligent Being as the
Author of all the works of creation, animate as well as inanimate; it
leaves no mysteries in the animate world unaccounted for. There is one
thing which the animate, as well as the inanimate world declares to
man, one thing everywhere plainly recorded, if we will only read it, and
that is the impress of design, the design of infinite wisdom. Any theory
which comes in with an attempt to ignore design as manifested in God's
creation, is a theory, I say, which attempts to dethrone God. This the
theory of Darwin does endeavor to do. If asked how our old theory
accounts for such uniformity of design in the midst of such perplexing
variety as we find in nature, we reply, that this can only be accounted
for on one admission, that the whole is the work of one Author, built
according, as it were, to one style; that it represents the unity of one
mind with the infinite power of adapting all its works in the most
perfect manner for the uses for which they