This is the whole Christian reasoning on the subject in a nutshell, and it has been considered by them perfectly conclusive and unanswerable. The logic is certainly unexceptionable, that is, the conclusion is quite legitimate from the premises; but it so happens that the premises are unsound, and in such a case the most unexceptionable logic goes for naught. If premises be erroneous, though the reasoning be ever so good, the conclusion must be erroneous. The major premiss of the foregoing syllogism, that "whatever manifests design must have had a designer," is a pure assumption, if by design is meant adaptation in Nature. So, likewise, is the minor premiss an assumption if by design is meant anything more than the adaptation pervading the universe, or at least that part cognizable to us. That the _fitness and adaptation_ observable in Nature do not establish intelligent design, is amply shown by the highest authorities--by the most eminent naturalists (Hæckel, Darwin, &c.) of the present day, to whom the reader is referred, and I need not here amplify in that direction. Nor is it at all necessary for my present purpose and work. It is only necessary to apply the _teductio ad absurdum_ to the above argument from design to show its utter fallacy. We will admit the premises and carry the reasoning of our Christian friends out a little further. By granting the truth of their major proposition and reasoning, logically from it we can prove more than is wholesome for the theologian, as thus:-- Whatever manifests design must have had a designer: God, in his alleged personality and attributes, manifests design; Therefore, God must have had a designer. It will thus be seen that Mr. Wendling's design argument from Catwell and Paley proves entirely too much for his own good, and hence it is that the astute theologians of the day have abandoned Paley and his design argument to their fate, where they have been duly relegated by the incisive logic of the modern materialist. Finally, Mr. Wendling comes to the moral argument, and in _conscience_ finds proof of the existence of a personal God. He complacently avers that "God made man with this omnipresent 'I ought' implanted in his nature." Now, in the first place, it is a great mistake that this "I ought" or conscience is _universally_ implanted in man--is "omnipresent," as Mr. Wendling puts it. That there are tribes without the moral sense of conscience, is sustained by the same unimpeachable authorities referred to in proof of the absence in them of any theistic conception or belief; and even in civilized (?) society we unfortunately find an occasional specimen of the _genus homo_ with no noticeable trace of that "variable quality" we call conscience.