Dr. Gray quotes from another writer the sentence, "It is a singular fact, that when we can find how anything is done, our first conclusion seems to be that God did not do it;" and then adds, "I agree with the writer that this first conclusion is premature and unworthy; I will add, deplorable. Through what faults of dogmatism on the one hand, and skepticism on the other, it came to be so thought, we need not here consider. Let us hope, and I confidently expect, that it is not to last; that the religious faith which survived without a shock the notion of the fixedness of the earth itself, may equally outlast the notion of the absolute fixedness of the species which inhabit it; that in the future, even more than in the past, faith in an _order_, which is the basis of science, will not--as it cannot reasonably--be dissevered from faith in an _Ordainer_, which is the basis of religion."[59] We thank God for that sentence. It is the concluding sentence of Dr. Gray's address as ex-President of "The American Association for the Advancement of Science," delivered August, 1872. Dr. Gray goes further. He says, "The proposition that the things and events in nature were not designed to be so, if logically carried out, is doubtless tantamount to atheism." Again, "To us, a fortuitous Cosmos is simply inconceivable. The alternative is a designed Cosmos.... If Mr. Darwin believes that the events which he supposes to have occurred and the results we behold around us were undirected and undesigned; or if the physicist believes that the natural forces to which he refers phenomena are uncaused and undirected, no argument is needed to show that such belief is atheistic."[60] We have thus arrived at the answer to our question, What is Darwinism? It is Atheism. This does not mean, as before said, that Mr. Darwin himself and all who adopt his views are atheists; but it means that his theory is atheistic; that the exclusion of design from nature is, as Dr. Gray says, tantamount to atheism. Among the last words of Strauss were these: "We demand for our universe the same piety which the devout man of old demanded for his God." "In the enormous machine of the universe, amid the incessant whirl and hiss of its jagged iron wheels, amid the deafening crash of its ponderous stamps and hammers, in the midst of this whole terrific commotion, man, a helpless and defenceless creature, finds himself placed, not secure for a moment that on an imprudent motion a wheel may not seize and rend him, or a hammer crush him to a powder. This sense of abandonment is at first something awful."[61]