As Arthur Devaux and Elsworth walked home with Linda, they discussed the reasonableness of the old and new beliefs about God. Both the doctor and his clever sister were declared atheists, and, as Bacon says, proved the unsatisfying nature of their negation of God by trying to make converts to their theory. The constant association with these friends, and others of the same opinions, had, little by little, sapped our hero’s faith. “How do you like the tone of our meetings, Mr. Elsworth?” asked Linda. “I was thinking,” said he,“how much they resemble the society of which Lady Wortley Montague once spoke, established for taking the word ‘not’ out of the commandments and putting it into the Creed. She rather approved of the idea, as she thought so many people loved to be disobedient, it might bring about a reformation in morals.” “Oh, but we are not immoral,” said her brother; “it is a higher morality, a higher basis we wish to introduce. We want first to be rid of the idea of God; the mechanic Thor with the hammer and workman’s tools. The design argument is played out, don’t you think?” “It is hard to have to believe, and still harder to maintain before one’s unlearned friends, that this complicated machinery, so compact, so admirably adapted to its purpose, had no designer,” said Elsworth, with a sigh he could not repress. “Oh, but it had!” said the young physician. “You must claim all for development that the theist claims for God the mechanic; you must claim that every articulation, every tendon and muscle assumed its form after long ages of necessity for its appearance had gradually evolved it in its present perfection.” “In a measure I grant this. I know how faculties come to us by reaching after them—know that the craftsman’s deftness is the result of long practice and education of sense and muscle; but I cannot find in the highest craftsman’s hand a single extra nerve or tendon, or a better articulation, than I find in the clumsiest day-labourer’s fist which never knew the use of a more delicate instrument than a spade.” “Of course not,” said Devaux; “it is not the individual, it is the type which is developed into a higher grade by slow stages, and so gradually that it is usually impossible to mark the precise advent of a distinct advance. Still, as Haeckel points out in the case of the axolotl in the Jardin des Plantes, some few advanced beyond the grade of development hitherto known in them; they lost their gills, changed the shape of their bodies, and, from aquatic animals, became lung-breathers and terrestrial animals. What do you say to that?” “I would like to know more precise particulars than Haeckel gives of the anatomical characteristics of the axolotl in its natural condition in Mexico; whether it may or may not be the fact that all axolotls, after having propagated themselves in their larval state, undergo the metamorphosis into salamander like animals (_Amblystoma_).”[1]