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 to
me, to extend this conception to the whole universe; to believe that not