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.
Pages:
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185