Westminster Sermons | Page 6

God, nor the firmament show you His handy-work, then our
poor arguments will not show them. "The eye can only see that which it
brings with it the power of seeing." We can only reassert that we see

design everywhere; and that the vast majority of the human race in
every age and clime has seen it. Analogy from experience, sound
induction--as we hold--from the works not only of men but of animals,
has made it an all but self-evident truth to us, that wherever there is
arrangement, there must be an arranger; wherever there is adaptation of
means to an end, there must be an adapter; wherever an organization,
there must be an organizer. The existence of a designing God is no
more demonstrable from nature than the existence of other human
beings independent of ourselves; or, indeed, than the existence of our
own bodies. But, like the belief in them, the belief in Him has become
an article of our common sense. And that this designing mind is, in
some respects, similar to the human mind, is proved to us--as Sir John
Herschel well puts it--by the mere fact that we can discover and
comprehend the processes of nature.
But here again, if we be contradicted, we can only reassert. If the old
words, "He that made the eye, shall he not see? he that planted the ear,
shall he not hear?" do not at once commend themselves to the intellect
of any person, we shall never convince that person by any arguments
drawn from the absurdity of conceiving the invention of optics by a
blind man, or of music by a deaf one.
So we will assert our own old-fashioned notion boldly: and more; we
will say, in spite of ridicule--That if such a God exists, final causes
must exist also. That the whole universe must be one chain of final
causes. That if there be a Supreme Reason, he must have reason, and
that a good reason, for every physical phenomenon.
We will tell the modern scientific man--You are nervously afraid of the
mention of final causes. You quote against them Bacon's saying, that
they are barren virgins; that no physical fact was ever discovered or
explained by them. You are right: as far as regards yourselves. You
have no business with final causes; because final causes are moral
causes: and you are physical students only. We, the natural Theologians,
have business with them. Your duty is to find out the How of things:
ours, to find out the Why. If you rejoin that we shall never find out the
Why, unless we first learn something of the How, we shall not deny

that. It may be most useful, I had almost said necessary, that the clergy
should have some scientific training. It may be most useful--I
sometimes dream of a day when it will be considered necessary--that
every candidate for Ordination should be required to have passed
creditably in at least one branch of physical science, if it be only to
teach him the method of sound scientific thought. But our having learnt
the How, will not make it needless, much less impossible, for us to
study the Why. It will merely make more clear to us the things of
which we have to study the Why; and enable us to keep the How and
the Why more religiously apart from each other.
But if it be said--After all, there is no Why. The doctrine of evolution,
by doing away with the theory of creation, does away with that of final
causes,--Let us answer boldly,--Not in the least. We might accept all
that Mr Darwin, all that Professor Huxley, all that other most able men,
have so learnedly and so acutely written on physical science, and yet
preserve our natural Theology on exactly the same basis as that on
which Butler and Paley left it. That we should have to develop it, I do
not deny. That we should have to relinquish it, I do.
Let me press this thought earnestly on you. I know that many wiser and
better men than I have fears on this point. I cannot share in them.
All, it seems to me, that the new doctrines of evolution demand is
this:--We all agree--for the fact is patent--that our own bodies, and
indeed the body of every living creature, are evolved from a seemingly
simple germ by natural laws, without visible action of any designing
will or mind, into the full organization of a human or other creature.
Yet we do not say on that account--God did not create me: I only grew.
We hold in this case to our old idea, and say--If there be evolution,
there must be an evolver. Now the new physical theories only ask us, it
seems