Here, according to my view, lies the great illusion. Those who in all sincerity, and often with deep emotion, plead after a fashion like this, profoundly misunderstand the situation. They are indeed worthy of respect. They must not be confounded with those unstable souls who ignore God when they are happy, deny Him when they are wretched, tolerate Him on Sundays, but truly call on Him only when life, or fortune, hangs doubtfully in the balance. They are of a different and more virile temper. But are they less mistaken? They search for proofs of God, as men search for evidence about ghosts or witches. Show us, they say, the marks of His presence. Tell us what problems His existence would solve. And when these tasks have been happily accomplished, then will we willingly place Him among the hypothetical causes by which science endeavours to explain the only world we directly know, the familiar world of daily experience. But God must not thus be treated as an entity, which we may add to, or subtract from, the sum of things scientifically known as the canons of induction may suggest. He is Himself the condition of scientific knowledge. If He be excluded from the causal series which produces beliefs, the cognitive series which justifies them is corrupted at the root. And as it is only in a theistic setting that beauty can retain its deepest meaning, and love its brightest lustre, so these great truths of æsthetics and ethics are but half-truths, isolated and imperfect, unless we add to them yet a third. We must hold that reason and the works of reason have their source in God; that from Him they draw their inspiration; and that if they repudiate their origin, by this very act they proclaim their own insufficiency. FOOTNOTES: [16] Let me here parenthetically remind you that again (as I observed in an earlier lecture) the Naturalism of which I speak is Naturalism in what, from our present point of view, must be regarded as its most plausible shape. Those who have followed, even at a distance, the trend of biological thought are aware that many naturalists of the highest authority are shaken in their allegiance to natural selection. They do not, indeed, exclude it from the evolutionary drama, but they reduce its rôle to insignificance. Why then, you may ask, do these lectures so constantly refer to selection, but say never a word about other theories of organic evolution? The answer is that selection, and only selection, really imitates contrivance. Other theories may deal, and do deal, with variation and heredity. But selection alone can explain adjustment; whence it follows that selection alone can imitate design. _Printed in Great Britain by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._ End of Project Gutenberg's Theism and Humanism, by Arthur James Balfour