ions protest against being considered
irreligious. Herbert Spencer says, that his doctrine of an inscrutable,
unintelligent, unknown force, as the cause of all things, is a much more
religious doctrine than that of a personal, intelligent, and voluntary
Being of infinite power and goodness. Matthew Arnold holds that an
unconscious "power which makes for right," is a higher idea of God than
the Jehovah of the Bible. Christ says, God is a Spirit. Holbach thought
that he made a great advance on that definition, when he said, God is
motion.

The third method of accounting for the contrivances manifested in the
organs of plants and animals, is that which refers them to the blind
operation of natural causes. They are not due to the continued
cooeperation and control of the divine mind, nor to the original purpose
of God in the constitution of the universe. This is the doctrine of the
Materialists, and to this doctrine, we are sorry to say, Mr. Darwin,
although himself a theist, has given in his adhesion. It is on this
account the Materialists almost deify him.

From what has been said, it appears that Darwinism includes three
distinct elements. First, evolution; or the assumption that all organic
forms, vegetable and animal, have been evolved or developed from one, or
a few, primordial living germs; second, that this evolution has been
effected by natural selection, or the survival of the fittest; and
third, and by far the most important and only distinctive element of his
theory, that this natural selection is without design, being conducted
by unintelligent physical causes. Neither the first nor the second of
these elements constitute Darwinism; nor do the two combined. As to the
first, namely, evolution, Mr. Darwin himself, in the historical sketch
prefixed to the fifth edition of his "Origin of Species," says, that
Lamarck, in 1811 and more fully in 1815, "taught that all species,
including man, are descended from other species." He refers to some six
or eight other scientists, as teaching the same doctrine. This idea of
Evolution was prominently presented and elaborated in the "Vestiges of
Creation," first published in 1844. Ulrici, Professor in the University
of Halle, Germany, in his work "Gott und die Natur," says that the
doctrine of evolution took no hold on the minds of scientific men, but
was positively rejected by the most eminent physiologists, among whom he
mentions J. Mueller, K. Wagner, Bischoff, Hoffmann, a