away from that to the real strength of the position.  All the rest of the contention against final causes would have come just as fitly from the lips of a man with vision, as from Saunderson.  The hypothetical inference of a deity from the marvels of adaptation to be found in the universe is unjustified, among other reasons, because it ignores or leaves unexplained the marvels of mis-adaptation in the universe.  It makes absolute through eternity a hypothesis which can at its best only be true relatively—­not merely to the number of our senses, but—­to a few partially chosen phenomena of our own little day.  It explains a few striking facts; it leaves wholly unexplained a far greater number of equally striking facts, even if it be not directly contradicted by them.  It is the invention of an imaginary agency to account for the scanty successes of creation, and an attribution to that agency of the kind of motives that might have animated a benevolent European living in the eighteenth century.  It leaves wholly unaccounted for the prodigious host of monstrous or imperfect organisms, and the appalling law of merciless and incessant destruction.

To us this is the familiar discussion of the day.  But let us return to the starting-point of this chapter.  In France a hundred and twenty years ago it was the first opening of a decisive breach in the walls that had sheltered the men of Western Europe against outer desolation for some fifteen centuries or more.  The completeness of Catholicism, as a self-containing system of life and thought, is now harder for Protestants or Sceptics to realise, than any other fact in the whole history of human society.  Catholicism was not only an institution, nor only a religious faith; it was also a philosophy and a systematised theory of the universe.  The Church during its best age directed the moral relations of individual men, and attempted, more or less successfully, to humanise the relations of communities.  It satisfied or stimulated the affections by its exaltation of the Virgin Mary as a supreme object of worship; it nourished the imagination on polytheistic legends of saints and martyrs; it stirred the religious emotions by touching and impressive rites; it surrounded its members with emblems of a special and invincible protection.  Catholicism, we have again and again to repeat, claimed to deal with life as a whole, and to leave no province of nature, no faculty of man, no need of intelligence or spirit, uncomprehended.  But we must not forget that, though this prodigious system had its root in the affections and sympathies of human nature, it was also fenced round by a theory of metaphysic.  It rested upon authority and tradition, but it also sought an expression in an intellectual philosophy of things.  The essence of this philosophy was to make man the final cause of the universe.  Its interpretation of the world was absolute; its conception of the Creator was absolute; its account of our intellectual impressions, of our moral rules,