totality of natural causes and their interactions, physical and physiological, reproduction, variation, birth, struggle, extinction—­in short, all that is going on in Nature; that the variations which in this interplay are picked out for survival are not intentionally guided; that “nothing can be more hopeless than the attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class by utility or the doctrine of final causes” (which Dr. Hodge takes to be the denial of any such thing as final causes); and that the interactions and processes going on which constitute natural selection may suffice to account for the present diversity of animals and plants (primordial organisms being postulated and time enough given) with all their structures and adaptations—­that is, to account for them scientifically, as science accounts for other things.

A good deal may be made of this, but does it sustain the indictment?  Moreover, the counts of the indictment may be demurred to.  It seems to us that only one of the three points which Darwin is said to deny is really opposed to the fourth, which he is said to maintain, except as concerns the perhaps ambiguous word unintended.  Otherwise, the origin of species through the gradual accumulation of variations—­i.e., by the addition of a series of small differences—­is surely not incongruous with their origin through “the original intention of the divine mind” or through “the constant and everywhere operative efficiency of God."- One or both of these Mr. Darwin (being, as Dr. Hodge says, a theist) must needs hold to in some form or other; wherefore he may be presumed to hold the fourth proposition in such wise as not really to contradict the first or the third.  The proper antithesis is with the second proposition only, and the issue comes to this:  Have the multitudinous forms of living creatures, past and present, been produced by as many special and independent acts of creation at very numerous epochs?  Or have they originated under causes as natural as reproduction and birth, and no more so, by the variation and change of preceding into succeeding species?

Those who accept the latter alternative are evolutionists.  And Dr. Hodge fairly allows that their views, although clearly wrong, may be genuinely theistic.  Surely they need not become the less so by the discovery or by the conjecture of natural operations through which this diversification and continued adaptation of species to conditions is brought about.  Now, Mr. Darwin thinks—­and by this he is distinguished. from most evolutionists—­that he can assign actual natural causes, adequate to the production of the present out of the preceding state of the animal and vegetable world, and so on backward—­thus uniting, not indeed the beginning but the far past with the present in one coherent system of Nature.  But in assigning actual natural causes and processes, and applying them to the explanation of the whole case, Mr. Dar-win assumes the obligation of maintaining