a preconcerted arrangement, a manifested design. A strange
contradiction would it be to insist that the shape and markings of
certain rude pieces of flint, lately found in drift deposits, prove
design, but that nicer and thousand-fold more complex adaptations to
use in animals and vegetables do not _a fortiori_ argue design.

We could not affirm that the arguments for design in Nature are
conclusive to all minds. But we may insist, upon grounds already
intimated, that whatever they were good for before Darwin's book
appeared, they are good for now. To our minds the argument from design
always appeared conclusive of the being and continued operation of an
intelligent First Cause, the Ordainer of Nature; and we do not see
that the grounds of such belief would be disturbed or shifted by the
adoption of Darwin's hypothesis. We are not blind to the philosophical
difficulties which the thorough-going implication of design in Nature
has to encounter, nor is it our vocation to obviate them. It suffices
us to know that they are not new nor peculiar difficulties,--that, as
Darwin's theory and our reasonings upon it did not raise these
perturbing spirits, they are not bound to lay them. Meanwhile, that
the doctrine of design encounters the very same difficulties in the
material that it does in the moral world is just what ought to be
expected.

So the issue between the skeptic and the theist is only the old one,
long ago argued out,--namely, whether organic Nature is a result of
design or of chance. Variation and natural selection open no third
alternative; they concern only the question, How the results, whether
fortuitous or designed, may have been brought about. Organic Nature
abounds with unmistakable and irresistible indications of design, and,
being a connected and consistent system, this evidence carried the