So the real question we come to is as to the way in which we are to conceive intelligent and efficient cause to be exerted, and upon what exerted. Are we bound to suppose efficient cause in all cases exerted upon nothing to evoke something into existence--and this thousands of times repeated, when a slight change in the details would make all the difference between successive species? Why may not the new species, or some of them, be designed diversifications of the old? There are, perhaps, only three views of efficient cause which may claim to be both philosophical and theistic: 1. The view of its exertion at the beginning of time, endowing matter and created things with forces which do the work and produce the phenomena. 2. This same view, with the theory of insulated interpositions, or occasional direct action, engrafted upon it--the view that events and operations in general go on in virtue simply of forces communicated at the first, but that now and then, and only now and then, the Deity puts his hand directly to the work. 3. The theory of the immediate, orderly, and constant, however infinitely diversified, action of the intelligent efficient Cause. It must be allowed that, while the third is preeminently the Christian view, all three are philosophically compatible with design in Nature. The second is probably the popular conception. Perhaps most thoughtful people oscillate from the middle view toward the first or the third--adopting the first on some occasions, the third on others. Those philosophers who like and expect to settle all mooted questions will take one or the other extreme. The Examiner inclines toward, the North American reviewer fully adopts, the third view, to the logical extent of maintaining that "the origin of an individual, as well as the origin of a species or a genus, can be explained only by the direct action of an intelligent creative cause." To silence his critics, this is the line for Mr. Darwin to take; for it at once and completely relieves his scientific theory from every theological objection which his reviewers have urged against it.