First of all, natural selection has been taken for a cause, or rather as dispensing with the necessity for a cause, by means of a confusion of ideas for which the author is responsible.  The system has therefore been understood as implying, that organized beings were formed without plan, without design, by the mere action of material causes, and as the result of modifications casual at first, and slowly accumulated.  Divine intelligence and creative power thus seemed to be disappearing from the organization of the universe, and to disappear especially before the lapse of time and the infinitely slow action of physical causes.  But while the system was taking wing, and soaring aloft, lo! the Creator at the commencement of things, and man conceived as a distinct being at the highest point of nature, have risen up as two idols and paralyzed its flight.  To Mr. Darwin, however, have speedily succeeded disciples compromising their master’s authority, and addressing him in some such language as this:  “You, our master, do not fully follow out your own opinions; you strain off gnats,[125] and swallow camels.  It is not more difficult to see in the living cellule a transformation of matter, and in man a transformation of the monkey, than to point out in a sponge the ancestor of the horse.  Cast down your idols, and confess that matter developed in course of time, under favorable circumstances, is the origin of all that is.”  Matter, time, circumstances—­these things have taken the place of God.

This, Gentlemen, is a philosophy, properly so called, which vainly pretends to find a support in the observation of facts.  Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the rival of Cuvier, set forth views analogous to those which Mr. Darwin has lately reproduced.  But in his replies to the attacks which were made upon his system, he affirmed that his theory offered “one of the most glorious manifestations of creative power, and an additional motive for admiration, gratitude, and love."[126] Two different interpretations may therefore be given to the system.  I wish to show you that these interpretations proceed in all cases from considerations external to the system.  The system in itself, as a theory of natural history, could not in any way affect injuriously the great interests of spiritual truth.

In order solidly to establish this assertion, I will suppose the hypotheses of the most advanced disciples of Mr. Darwin to have been verified by experimental science.  I take for granted that it has been proved that all plants and all animals have descended, by way of regular generation, from living cellules originally similar; and that the material particles of the globe, at a given moment, drew together to form these cellules.  And now where do we stand?  Will God henceforward be a superfluous hypothesis?  Do the atheistical consequences which it is desired to draw from this doctrine proceed logically from it?  Most certainly not!

I observe first of all that there exists a great question relative to the beginning of things.  Matter is perfected and organized in process of time—­but whence comes matter itself?  Is it also formed little by little in process of time?  Does non-existence become existence little by little?  So it is said in the preface to the French translation of Mr. Darwin’s book.  But this appertains to high metaphysics; and I pass on.