to the whole extent of the extreme differences. All appears to have come to pass in the course of Nature, and therefore under second causes; but what these are, or how connected and interfused with first cause, we know not now, perhaps shall never know.

Nor

Now views like these, when formulated by religious instead of scientific thought, make more of Divine providence and fore-ordination than of Divine intervention; but perhaps they are not the less theistical on that account. are they incompatible with "special creative act," unless natural process generally is incompatible with it, which no theist can allow. No Christian theist can eliminate the idea of Divine intervention any more than he can that of Divine ordination; neither, on the other hand, can he agree that what science removes from the supernatural to the natural is lost to theism. But, the business of science is with the course of Nature, not with interruptions of it, which must rest on their own special evidence. Still more, it is the business of science to question searchingly all seeming interruptions of it, and its privilege, to refer events and phenomena not at the first but in the last resort to Divine will.

Moreover, "special creative act" is not excluded by evolutionists on scientific ground, is not excluded at all on principle, except by those who adopt a philosophy which antecedently rules out all possibility of it. Darwin postulates one creative act and a probability of more, and so in principle is at one with Wallace and with Dana, who insist on more.

But it has been said, and indeed is said over and over, even by thoughtful men, that, although Darwinism is not necessarily atheistic, yet, when once started it dispenses with further need of God. "Given [it is said] the laws which we find, then there is no more use for God, and all things have come out as we find them with none of his supervision. There may have been-we do not know-a God once; but law and not God, is the great Creator." few words should dispose of this. First, by what right is it assumed that the Darwinian differs from the orthodox conception of law? In the next place, this line of argument applies equally to a series of creative acts separated by intervals, during which it could with the same reason (or unreason) be said that there is no use for God, that there may have been a God at

A

times! So it cuts away the ground from under the Christian evolution which the writer quoted from allows, as well as from that which he deprecates. And it equally dispenses with use for God in Nature for the several thousand years which have passed since creation under the biblical view was finished, and the Creator "rested from all the work which he had made.” There is no more validity in the argument in the one case than in the others.

A word or two upon the subject of creative acts occurring in time may not be out of place. These, when spoken of in the present connection, do not usually refer to the making of a new form of plant or animal instanter out of the dust of the ground. However it might have been when there was only one act of creation to think of, the enormous crudeness of such a conception when applied to a long succession of animals would now be seriously felt by every one. It is a phrase most used by those who accept the idea of the evolution of one species from another, but who feel the utter incompetence of known natural causes to account for it. In the absence of such causes, they, being theists, naturally (and I cannot say unphilosophically) assign the simpler and seemingly

easier part of evolution to recondite natural causes which they are unable to specify, the more difficult or inscrutable to a diviner and more direct or supernatural act, which they liken to creation. I suppose they do not feel the necessity, as they have not the ability, to draw any definite line between what they think mere Nature may accomplish, and what they believe she cannot. Probably what they have in mind is mediate creation and not miracle. Perhaps they are convinced that if they could behold the birth of a species, they would see nothing more miraculous than in the birth of an individual. They mean that the springs of Nature are somehow touched by a new form or instance of force directed to some new end. Yet so they must be in a degree in the origination of a new race or variety. This whole conception of mediate creation is logically carried out to its extreme by my philosophical colleague, Professor Bowen, when he concludes that "not only every new species but that each individual living organism, originated in a special act of creation." *

So the difference between pure Darwinism

* North American Review for November, 1879, p. 463.

and a more theistically expressed evolution is not so great as it seemed. Both agree in the opinion that species are evolved from species, and that evolution somehow occurs in the course of Nature. Darwinism opines that the whole is a natural result of general causes such as we know of and in a degree understand, such as we recognize under the concrete terms of variability, heredity, and the like, - terms which we can estimate and limit only by reference to what we see coming to pass, along with complex physical interactions which are more measurable and predictable. The very much that it has not accounted for by these causes and processes, it assumes may be in time accounted for by them, or by as yet unrecognized general causes like them. The specially theistic evolution referred to judges that these general causes cannot account for the whole work, and that the unknown causes are of a more special character and higher order. I think it does not declare that these are not secondary causes, and whether they would be ranked as natural causes would depend upon the sense in which the term Nature was at the moment used. Probably such evolutionists, if they had to give form to their conceptions, would vary in all degrees between