It is very easy to assume, that, because events in Nature are in one sense accidental, and the operative forces which bring them to pass are themselves blind and unintelligent, (all forces are,) therefore they are undirected, or that he who describes these events as the results of such forces thereby assumes that they are undirected.  This is the assumption of the Boston reviewers, and of Mr. Agassiz, who insists that the only alternative to the doctrine, that all organized beings were supernaturally created as they are, is, that they have arisen spontaneously through the omnipotence of matter.[4]

As to all this, nothing is easier than to bring out in the conclusion what you introduce in the premises.  If you import atheism into your conception of variation and natural selection, you can readily exhibit it in the result.  If you do not put it in, perhaps there need be none to come out.  While the mechanician is considering a steamboat or locomotive engine as a material organism, and contemplating the fuel, water, and steam, the source of the mechanical forces and how they operate, he may not have occasion to mention the engineer.  But, the orderly and special results accomplished, the why the movement is in this or that particular direction, etc., are inexplicable without him.  If Mr. Darwin believes that the events which he supposes to have occurred and the results we behold were undirected and undesigned, or if the physicist believes that the natural forces to which he refers phenomena are uncaused and undirected, no argument is needed to show that such belief is atheism.  But the admission of the phenomena and of these natural processes and forces does not necessitate any such belief, nor even render it one whit less improbable than before.

Surely, too, the accidental element may play its part in Nature without negativing design in the theist’s view.  He believes that the earth’s surface has been very gradually prepared for man and the existing animal races, that vegetable matter has through a long series of generations imparted fertility to the soil in order that it may support its present occupants, that even beds of coal have been stored up for man’s benefit.  Yet what is more accidental, and more simply the consequence of physical agencies, than the accumulation of vegetable matter in a peat-bog, and its transformation into coal?  No scientific person at this day doubts that our solar system is a progressive development, whether in his conception he begins with molten masses, or aeriform or nebulous masses, or with a fluid revolving mass of vast extent, from which the specific existing worlds have been developed one by one.  What theist doubts that the actual results of the development in the inorganic worlds are not merely compatible with design, but are in the truest sense designed results?  Not Mr. Agassiz, certainly, who adopts a remarkable illustration of design directly founded on the nebular hypothesis,