their effects. And their effects are very remote hints of their real nature. It is really painful to read the elaborate wastes of effort made in our day to prove that some theological dogma about some power beyond experience is not refuted by experience. As if such proof made anybody’s creed either more or less doubtful. A really well-founded Theism would not be, in this tedious way, eternally on the defensive.
But there is the other aspect of the matter. An intelligent power, were it admitted, would not need to be moral. If there is design, is the designer demonstrably good? Let us pass over to that question.
VII.
If evolution has done anything for us, it has tended to increase our sense of the mystery of the world of experience, and therefore the philosophically minded religious student is in truth, for yet this other reason, weary of all this empirical Theism, namely, because he despairs of finding out, by such an empirical process, anything about the actual purposes of any designer, even if there be a designer. To study English literature in the rubbish heaps of a book-binder’s work-shop, would seem to a wise man a much more hopeful undertaking than to seek any one notion of the real plan on which this world is made from a merely empirical study of our little fragment of nature. Science is right in abandoning such undertakings wholly and for all its now probable future work. Religion must find the religious
