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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, has 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 organisation 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 individuals merely, but whole varieties and races, the total organised life on this planet, and it may be the total organisation of the universe, have been evolved just as our bodies are, by natural laws acting through circumstance. This may be true, or may be false. But all its truth can do to the natural theologian will be to make him believe that the Creator bears the same relation to the whole universe as that Creator undeniably bears to every individual human body.

I entreat you to weigh these words, which have not been written in haste; and I entreat you also, if you wish to see how little the new theory, that species may have been gradually created by variation, natural selection, and so forth, interferes with the old theory of design, contrivance, and adaptation, nay, with the fullest admission of benevolent final causes–I entreat you, I say, to study Darwin’s “Fertilisation of Orchids”–a book which (whether his main theory be true or not) will still remain a most valuable addition to natural theology.