every organic being,”—­if that, I say, were proven to be true:  ought God’s care and God’s providence to seem less or more magnificent in our eyes?  Of old it was said by Him without whom nothing is made, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.”  Shall we quarrel with Science, if she should show how those words are true?  What, in one word, should we have to say but this?—­We knew of old that God was so wise that He could make all things:  but, behold, He is so much wiser than even that, that He can make all things make themselves.

But it may be said—­These notions are contrary to Scripture.  I must beg very humbly, but very firmly, to demur to that opinion.  Scripture says that God created.  But it nowhere defines that term.  The means, the How, of Creation is nowhere specified.  Scripture, again, says that organized beings were produced, each according to their kind.  But it nowhere defines that term.  What a kind includes; whether it includes or not the capacity of varying—­which is just the question in point—­is nowhere specified.  And I think it a most important rule in Scriptural exegesis, to be most cautious as to limiting the meaning of any term which Scripture itself has not limited, lest we find ourselves putting into the teaching of Scripture our own human theories or prejudices.  And consider—­Is not man a kind?  And has not mankind varied, physically, intellectually, spiritually?  Is not the Bible, from beginning to end, a history of the variations of mankind, for worse or for better, from their original type?  Let us rather look with calmness, and even with hope and goodwill, on these new theories; for, correct or incorrect, they surely mark a tendency towards a more, not a less, Scriptural view of Nature.  Are they not attempts, whether successful or unsuccessful, to escape from that shallow mechanical notion of the universe and its Creator which was too much in vogue in the eighteenth century among divines as well as philosophers; the theory which Goethe, to do him justice—­and after him Mr Thomas Carlyle—­have treated with such noble scorn; the theory, I mean, that God has wound up the universe like a clock, and left it to tick by itself till it runs down, never troubling Himself with it; save possibly—­for even that was only half believed—­by rare miraculous interferences with the laws which He Himself had made?  Out of that chilling dream of a dead universe ungoverned by an absent God, the human mind, in Germany especially, tried during the early part of this century to escape by strange roads; roads by which there was no escape, because they were not laid down on the firm ground of scientific facts.  Then, in despair, men turned to the facts which they had neglected; and said—­We are weary of philosophy:  we will study you, and you alone.  As for God, who can find Him?  And they have worked at the facts like gallant and honest men; and their work, like all good work, has produced, in the last fifty years, results more enormous