probable a supposition, that you have a right to demand positive proof before entertaining it. Finally, that we have desires, capacities for knowledge and enjoyment and usefulness which our present physical life is greatly inadequate to enable us to fulfil, while it is by no means a positive proof of a future life, is certainly, so far as it goes, an indication; and we may rightfully require those who deny the future life to account for these desires and capacities, and put upon them the burden of proving their assertion; because the probability is strongly against them.

If we find the theory of a future life entirely in harmony with the known laws of our being; if it is furthermore required for the welfare, and even the existence, of human society on this planet; if it conforms with the other phenomena which we observe in ourselves and in nature, or at least if it offends none, we may safely and even scientifically maintain that this theory shall be held true-until it is disproved.

But observe that those who deny are the very men who admit that no proof, in the sense demanded in physical investigations, is attainable by them on this subject. They have no evidence to produce on their side.

VIII.

THE LIMITS OF SPECULATION.

Ir the world was made by God, instead of happening by chance, we may, I think, believe that He had some purpose or design in the making of it. What we thus conceive of Him in regard to the general creation, there is a disposition in the human mind to hold also of details.

The animals live their whys and wherefores.

lives without thought of such The pig contentedly eats his acorns, and does not even look up into the oak to see whence his supplies are dropping; and a cow at pasture does not trouble herself about the origin of the grass; and if she thought about it at all, which she does not, would no doubt be quite satisfied that it was made for her to eat; or, to put the matter in the language of philosophers, that to be eaten by a cow was the "final cause" of the grass.

If you should assert that the real "final cause" of the grass was to be turned by the cow into milk and butter for your own use, you would go only a short step further than the cow, in precisely the same direction; and you might not be any nearer a right

guess at the purposes of the Creator. But the fact is, the mind of man is prone to such guesses and speculations, and this is one of the particulars in which we are very widely distinguished from the beasts. We strive to penetrate the Divine intentions.

It is as well to do this modestly-remembering the vast difference between the Creator's infinite intelligence and our own finite minds. But because a child is pretty certain to reason wrongly and inconclusively concerning the actions of its parents we need not forbid it to reason at all. Nor, on the other hand, if a boy should conclude that he could not comprehend the reasons which controlled the acts of his father would he be warranted in asserting that the father had no reasons or purpose at all.

Undoubtedly the discussion of the Divine purpose is apt to mislead us, and is often futile; and we need not find fault with some philosophers and men of science if they are as irritable at the mention of "final causes as a bull at the exhibition of a red rag. They assert that the argument of design is only a vicious reasoning in a circle; and some modern men of science profess to show us that there is no firm ground at all for the ascription of purpose to the Creator, if there was a Creator; that the eye, for instance, was not made to see with, because, as they assert, it came about by a course of slow develop

ment of optic nerves and other parts out of the vesicular structure of some originally non-seeing animal. They tell us that the first crude germ of vision was a nerve in some zoophite which chanced to be affected by or was susceptible to light rays; that the advantage in the struggle for life gained by the creature possessing even the dimmest vision was so great that it was better able to escape destruction than its non-seeing companions, and that thus the power or faculty of vision was preserved with its possessor, and in some unexplained way developed and perfected in the course of ages.

Now, if you will think a moment you will see that this, after all, is only an account of how these philosophers suppose the eye to have come about; and if they could scientifically establish the truth of their supposition this would by no means prove that the Creator had no design in the matter, or that, in fact, the purpose of the eye, its final cause, was not to see with. If a carpenter should explain to you the various processes by which he had evolved a chair out of a tree, which had first to grow, then to be cut down, then to be sawed into lumber, parts of which were finally, with a good deal more detail, fashioned into a chair, all this would not bear upon the question whether or no the "final cause" of the chair was to be sat on.

God need not have made a nerve susceptible to light rays. He need not have made this susceptible nerve capable, in the course of ages, of becoming the perfect eye with which we see. To describe to us the process by which the eye was formed obviously does not tell us anything whatever of the purpose or design of him who caused its formation.

Mr. Darwin, who never goes too far in his reasoning, asks, "May we not believe that [by gradual development] a living optical instrument might be thus formed, as superior to one of glass as the works of the Creator are to those of man?" You notice that he does not exclude design, but, on the contrary, plainly includes it. He argues only that the designer, God, preferred a particular way of forming the eye; and on that matter you may without harm take the knowledge and research of so great and careful an investigator as Darwin for your guide.

There is, however, some ground for the scientific man's hostility to the argument from design. It has often been carried to extremes; it has sometimes barred the way of scientific research; and we ought not to forget that there is a certain impertinence in our readiness to explain the meaning and intentions of the Creator. That the eye was made to enable us to see seems to us clear enough; that our hands are marvellously fitted by intricate struct