series of states of consciousness." "How," he asked, "is the 'originating Mind' to be thought of as having states produced by things objective to it, as discriminating among these states, and classing them as like and unlike; and as preferring one objective result to another."[6] It was by a similar line of reasoning that Romanes reached the like conclusions.[7] "In my opinion," he said, "no explanation of natural order can either be conceived or named other than that of intelligence as the supreme directing cause." But "this cause must be widely different from anything that we know of Mind in ourselves." "If such a Mind exists, it is not conceivable as existing, and we are precluded from assigning to it any attributes."

It was obvious that, if no satisfactory reply were forthcoming to such a contention, the very word Theology must be discarded, since there would be no longer any need for it, or justification of its use.

But there was yet a further criticism that was supposed by not a few to complete the discomfiture of those who still clung to the traditional beliefs. We can find it forcibly expressed in one of the earlier writings of Romanes, who in this case was endorsing the verdict of Mill. "Supposing the Deity to be omnipotent, there can be no inference more transparent than that such wholesale suffering, for whatever ends designed, exhibits an incalculably greater deficiency of beneficence in the divine character than that which we know in any, the very worst, of human characters. For let us pause for one moment to think of what suffering in Nature means. Some hundreds of millions of years ago, some millions of millions of animals must be supposed to have become sentient. Since that time till the present there must have been millions and millions of generations of millions and millions of individuals. And throughout all this period of incalculable duration, this inconceivable host of sentient organisms have been in a state of unceasing battle, dread, ravin, pain. Looking to the outcome, we find that more than one-half of the species which have survived the ceaseless struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient forms of life feasting on higher and sentient forms; we find teeth and talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers moulded for torment—everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, sickness, with oozing blood and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly close in deaths of cruel torture!"[8]

Huxley, arguing to the same effect, concluded that "since thousands of times a minute, were our ears sharp enough, we should hear sighs and groans of pain like those heard by Dante at the gate of hell, the world cannot be governed by what we call benevolence."[9]

Haeckel went so far as to propose to describe by the term "dysteleology" that part of the science of Biology which collected the facts that gave direct contradiction to the idea of beneficial "purposive arrangement."

Such were the difficulties which loomed largest before the minds of vast numbers of thinking men and women, and did much to shake the general confidence in religion, in the years that followed the discoveries which culminated in the Darwinian theory of evolution. It must not be supposed that these thoughts were lightly entertained, nor may we imagine that they gave no distress to those who sincerely believed that they were bound to accept what seemed to be their inevitable consequences. To quote again from the Candid Examination of Romanes, we may take it that he was speaking for many others when he said, "Forasmuch as I am far from being able to agree with those who affirm that the twilight doctrine of the new faith is a desirable substitute for the waning splendour of 'the old,' I am not ashamed to confess that, with this virtual negation of God, the universe to me has lost its soul of loveliness; and although, from henceforth the precept 'to work while it is day' will doubtless but gain an intensified force from the terribly intensified meaning of the words 'that the night cometh when no man can work,' yet when at times I think, as think at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of that creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of existence as now I find it—at such times I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my nature is susceptible."

[1] Logic, Chap. V.

[2] The Riddle of the Universe, Chaps. XIV, XV.

[3] Chap. XII.

[4] Fragments of Science, p. 222.

[5] First Principles, i., pp. 33-39.

[6] Essays, Vol. III., pp. 246, f.

[7] In an essay written before 1889.

[8] A Candid Examination of Theism (1876), pp. 171, f.

[9] Nineteenth Century, February, 1888.

CHAPTER IV

THE COUNTER-ARGUMENTS

It must not be imagined that all the arguments were on one side. Far from it. The defenders of the old faith were many, and not the least able of them were drawn from the ranks of the men of science. The list of scientific leaders who avowedly ranged themselves on the Christian side, if it were made out, would be a long one. It would include distinguished names such as those of Faraday, Joule, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Kelvin, Stokes, Tait, Adams, Clerk Maxwell, Salmon, Cayley,