Is There a God? 219 systems must have been created, arranged and upheld by a Divine Mind. When, restricting his attention to the earth on which he stands, he notes the indications of design or of adaptation of means to end which are everywhere visible, as witnessed, for example, in the constancy of nature’s laws and forces, in the endless variety of nature’s forms, inanimate and animate, as well as in their wonderful gradation not only in their kinds but also in the times of their appearing, and in the marvelous adjustment of organs to environment, he feels con strained to reason that these things are not the result of chance which is blind or the spontaneous output of matter, which in itself, so far as known to him, is powerless, lifeless and unin telligent, but can only be the handiwork of a Creative Mind. When further he reflects that in the whole round of human ex perience, effects have never been known to be produced without causes; that designs have never been known to be conceived or worked out without designers and artificers ; that dead mat ter has never been known to spring into life either spon taneously or by the application of means; that one kind of life has never been known to transmute itself spontaneously or to be transmuted artificially into another, neither a vegetable into an animal, nor an animal into a man; and when lastly, accept ing the guidance of science, he perceives that in the upward ascent or evolution of nature dead matter was, after an inter val, perhaps of millions of years, followed by vegetable life, and this again by animal existence, and this by man precisely as Scripture asserts, he once more feels himself shut up to the conclusion that the whole cosmos must be the production of mind, even of a Supreme Intelligence infinitely powerful, wise and good. Like the Hebrew psalmist he feels impelled to say, “O Lord! how manifold are Thy works: in wisdom hast Thou made them a ll!” Should the philosopher interject, that this argument does not necessarily require an Infinite Intelligence but only an artificer capable of constructing such a universe as the present,
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