Now, all former experience shows that it is neither safe nor wise to pronounce a whole system "thoroughly atheistic" which it is conceded may be held theistically, and which is likely to be largely held, if not to prevail, on scientific grounds. It may be well to remember that, "of the two great minds of the seventeenth century, Newton and Leibnitz, both profoundly religious as well as philosophical, one produced the theory of gravitation, the other objected to that theory that it was subversive of natural religion; also that the nebular hypothesis--a natural consequence of the theory of gravitation and of the subsequent progress of physical and astronomical discovery--has been denounced as atheistical even down to our day." It has now outlived anathema. It is undeniable that Mr. Darwin lays himself open to this kind of attack. The propounder of natural selection might be expected to make the most of the principle, and to overwork the law of parsimony in its behalf. And a system in which exquisite adaptation of means to ends, complicated inter-dependencies, and orderly sequences, appear as results instead of being introduced as factors, and in which special design is ignored in the particulars, must needs be obnoxious, unless guarded as we suppose Mr. Darwin might have guarded his. ground if he had chosen to do so. Our own opinion, after long consideration, is, that Mr. Darwin has no atheistical intent; and that, as respects the test question of design in Nature, his view may be made clear to the theological mind by likening it to that of the "believer in general but not in particular Providence." There is no need to cull passages in support of this interpretation from his various works while the author--the most candid of men--retains through all the editions of the "Origin of Species" the two mottoes from Whewell and Bishop Butler.[VII-2] The gist of the matter lies in the answer that should be rendered to the questions--1. Do order and useful-working collocation, pervading a system throughout all its parts, prove design? and, 2. Is such evidence negatived or invalidated by the probability that these particular collocations belong to lineal series of such in time, and diversified in the course of Nature--grown up, so to say, step by step? We do not use the terms "adaptation, "arrangement of means to ends," and the like, because they beg the question in stating it.