them. When unfolded, it comprises a body of facts, and it involves a principle. The principle is that an effect implies a cause. The special consideration and defence of this law may be adjourned to a future lecture, when it will come up in more favorable circumstances to admit of a full discussion. In the first series of lectures in this course, we are invited to contemplate the phenomena and laws of the physical world, so far as they bear marks of being adapted to each other by a designing mind contemplating a good end.

The argument is one which commends itself to all minds, though it is put into shape only by the logician and the expounder of natural theology. The child finds the impression stealing in upon him, as he inspects the curious objects around him, the fir cone, the flower, the berry, the structure of his favorite animal, or those lights kindled nightly in the heavens, or as he is taught to connect these daily gifts with God the giver. The peasant, the savage, feels it, as he sees the grass and trees springing and growing and bearing seed, as he is led to observe the self-preserving instincts of the brute creatures, as he takes a passing survey of the wondrous provisions for maintaining life in his own frame, or finds himself furnished with food and clothing by very complicated arrangements of Providence. Flowing spontaneously into the minds. of all, the conviction will force itself into the innermost heart of the speculative unbeliever. "No one," said David Hume, as he walked home one

ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN.

3

beautiful evening with a friend, "can look up to that sky without feeling that it must have been put in order by an intelligent being." "But who made all these things?" was the curt reply of Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been obliged to listen to the wretched sophistries of a set of French atheists, bred in the bloody revolutionary period,—" but who made all these things?" pointing to the heavens.

The argument is one and the same in all ages. "He that formed the eye, shall He not see?" is the way in which the Psalmist expresses it. Socrates is represented, in the "Memorabilia" of Xenophon, as pointing to the traces of purpose in the eye, the ear, and the teeth, and to the care taken of every individual man in the Divine providence. Though the argument is identical, yet it takes different forms in different ages; one reason of which is to be found in the circumstance that the physical facts require to be differently stated as science opens to us new views of the nature of the universe. Balbus the Stoic, the representative of theism in Cicero's treatise "De Natura Deorum," drew a solid enough argument from the order of the heavenly bodies, though he assumed that the sun moved round the earth. Those living since the acceptance of the theory of Copernicus expound the facts in a more scientific manner, but not more conclusively, as bearing on the relation of God to his works. Scriptures tell us that man cannot number the stars, but it has been found that he can count the stars seen by the naked eye; but the science which

The

enables him to do this has disclosed other stars, so that it is still true that the stars cannot be reckoned for multitude. It is much the same with the argument for the Divine existence: modern investigation modifies old views only to open new and grander ones. The peasant, who notices a watch going and pointing to the hour, is as sure that there is design in it as the mechanic who can trace the relation of all the parts, the mainspring, the wheels, and the hands. And the same peasant is as sure that there is purpose in the hand as Sir Charles Bell was, when he pointed out the wonderful adaptations of the various bones and joints and muscles and nerves. A theistic writer living in the middle of the seventeenth century, — say Milton in writing "Paradise Lost," or Charnock in delivering his "Discourses on the Attributes,” — could not expound the revolutions of the heavenly bodies in the same satisfactory manner as one living in the following century, when Newton had established the law of universal gravitation; but the one might have as reasonable a conviction as the other that the heavens declare the glory of God."

It is a humiliating but instructive fact that many new discoveries in physical science have, in the first instance, been denounced as atheistic, because they were not conformable to the opinions which religious men had been led to entertain, not of God, but of the phenomena of the world. Even the illustrious Leibnitz charged the system of Newton with having an irreligious tendency, and (as I once

WHAT SCIENCE HAS TO DO.

5

heard Humboldt denouncing, in an interview which I had with him a few months before his death) sought to poison the mind of the famous Princess Sophie of Prussia, against him. It is a curious circumstance that the law of gravitation had to be defended on the side of religion, at the beginning of last century, by Maclaurin, in his "Account of the Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton." In the last age, numbers trained in a narrow theological geology (not found in Scripture, but drawn out of it by wrong inference) opposed the discoveries as to the successive strata and races of animated beings on the earth's surface, and could scarcely be reconciled to them when such men as Buckland and Chalmers, Hitchcock and Hugh Miller, showed that these facts widened indefinitely the horizon of our vision, — added a new province to the universe of God, by disclosing a past history before unknown, and opened new and grander views of the prescience and preordination of God. And, in our times, there are persons who cannot take in these new doctrines of natural history and comparative language, not because they run counter to any doctrine or precept of religion, but because they conflict with certain historical or scientific preconceptions which have become bound up with their devout beliefs.

All this shows that religious men qua religious men are not to be allowed to decide for us the truths of science. Conceive an Ecumenical Council at Rome, or an Assembly of Divines at Westminster, or an Episcopal Convocation at Lambeth, or a Con

gregational Council at Plymouth, or a Methodist Conference in Connecticut, taking upon it to decide for or against the discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, or the grand doctrine established in our day of the Conservation of Force and Correlation of all the Physical Forces, on the ground of their being favorable or unfavorable to religion! I have heard fervent preachers denouncing the nebular hypothesis of the heavens and the theories of the origin of organic species in a manner and spirit which was only fitted to damage the religion which they meant to recommend, in the view of every man of science who heard them; and which drew from others of us the wish that they had kept by what they were fit for, proclaiming the gospel to perishing sinners, and illustrating the graces of the Christian character, and left science to men of science. On the other hand, our scientific men are not, as scientific men, qualified to find out and to estimate the theological bearings of the laws which they have discovered. For if there be a religious, there may also be an irreligious bias. There may be some as anxious in their hatred to expel God from his works as there are others resolute in their love to bring him in at times or in ways in which he does not choose to appear. The laws of the physical world are to be determined by scientific men, proceeding in the way of a careful induction of facts; and, so far as they follow their method, I have the most implicit faith in them, and I have the most perfect confidence that the truth which they discover will not run counter to any