Whether God could create, did He choose, by the action of blind chance, trained theologians may decide. But it is obvious that if a system of blind chance were demonstrably true, those great modern intellects who say in their hearts “There is No God” have a powerful weapon, in the Theory of Natural Selection. They seized that weapon with gusto; and they are still desperately clinging to the handle though the business part of the instrument has long been battered shapeless by their conquering opponents. Here I must pause to make an important point. I have said that the motives which made the first theorizers incline to an atheist solution were not consciously atheist. Indeed, it was characteristic of their generation that they could not define their own first principles. Further, they lived at a time when Christian principles were still powerful around them in the Protestant middle classes of England, and probably they honestly desired to combine incompatibles. I want to make this point quite clear, because it is one upon which there has been a great deal of misunderstanding. Neither Darwin nor Wallace, nor a host of other lesser known people who were all theorizing in much the same way a lifetime ago, were philosophic atheists after the type of the great Lucretius.[1] They were not of that calibre. None of them could think out a consistent philosophical theory, true or false. Most of them would have told you, in a muddle-headed sort of way, that they reverently believed in a Creator, while actively preaching the crudely mechanical and accidental processes which alone they could grasp. Footnote 1: It is more accurate to say of Lucretius that he did not deny the Gods: only their action on our affairs. But the great Epicurean philosophy of Antiquity was essentially Atheist, though in a form far nobler than the vulgar “No Goddism” of yesterday. But though these men characteristically confused themselves about what they did and did not ultimately believe (or rather feel) in religion—i.e. what their ultimate philosophy really was—any modern reader, especially any reader with the clear intelligence of the Catholic, can see what was running through their emotional brains. The idea of Design was intolerable to them. It was inextricably connected in their minds with what _they_ thought the word “Creation” meant. They had been taught in their childhood that “Creation” meant millions and millions of quite separate, mature, complicated things appearing suddenly, unconnected one with the other: magic full-grown oak trees without acorns to grow from.