Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing divine purpose.  It used to be a question of purpose against mechanism, of one or the other.  It was as if one should say “My shoes are evidently designed to fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have been produced by machinery.”  We know that they are both:  they are made by a machinery itself designed to fit the feet with shoes.  Theology need only stretch similarly the designs of God.  As the aim of a football-team is not merely to get the ball to a certain goal (if that were so, they would simply get up on some dark night and place it there), but to get it there by a fixed machinery of conditions—­the game’s rules and the opposing players; so the aim of God is not merely, let us say, to make men and to save them, but rather to get this done through the sole agency of nature’s vast machinery.  Without nature’s stupendous laws and counterforces, man’s creation and perfection, we might suppose, would be too insipid achievements for God to have designed them.

This saves the form of the design-argument at the expense of its old easy human content.  The designer is no longer the old man-like deity.  His designs have grown so vast as to be incomprehensible to us humans.  The what of them so overwhelms us that to establish the mere that of a designer for them becomes of very little consequence in comparison.  We can with difficulty comprehend the character of a cosmic mind whose purposes are fully revealed by the strange mixture of goods and evils that we find in this actual world’s particulars.  Or rather we cannot by any possibility comprehend it.  The mere word ‘design’ by itself has, we see, no consequences and explains nothing.  It is the barrenest of principles.  The old question of whether there is design is idle.  The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer—­and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature’s particulars.

Remember that no matter what nature may have produced or may be producing, the means must necessarily have been adequate, must have been fitted to that production.  The argument from fitness to design would consequently always apply, whatever were the product’s character.  The recent Mont-Pelee eruption, for example, required all previous history to produce that exact combination of ruined houses, human and animal corpses, sunken ships, volcanic ashes, etc., in just that one hideous configuration of positions.  France had to be a nation and colonize Martinique.  Our country had to exist and send our ships there.  If God aimed at just that result, the means by which the centuries bent their influences towards it, showed exquisite intelligence.  And so of any state of things whatever, either in nature or in history, which we find actually realized.  For the parts of things must always make some definite resultant, be it chaotic or harmonious.  When we look at what has actually come, the conditions must always appear perfectly designed to ensure it.  We can always say, therefore, in any conceivable world, of any conceivable character, that the whole cosmic machinery may have been designed to produce it.