It is again the dummy, helpless and deformed, set up merely for the purpose of being knocked down.
It must once more be insisted on, that though man is indeed compelled to conceive of God in human terms, and to speak of Him by epithets objectively false, from their hopeless inadequacy, yet nevertheless the Christian thinker declares that inadequacy in the strongest manner, and vehemently rejects from his idea of God all terms distinctly implying infirmity or limitation.
Now, Mr.Darwin speaks as if all who believe in the Almighty were compelled to accept as really applicable to the Deity conceptions which affirm limits and imperfections.

Thus he says: "Can it be reasonably maintained that the Creator intentionally ordered" "that certain fragments of rock should assume certain shapes, so that the builder might erect his edifice ?" Why, surely every theist must maintain that in the first foundation of the universe--the primary and absolute creation--God saw and knew every purpose which every atom and particle of matter should ever subserve in all suns and systems, and throughout all coming aeons of time.

It is almost incredible, but nevertheless it seems necessary to think that the difficulty thus proposed rests on a sort of notion that amidst the boundless profusion of nature there is too much for God to superintend; that the number of objects is too great for an infinite and {259} _omnipresent_ being to attend singly to each and all in their due proportions and needs! In the same way Mr.Darwin asks whether God can have ordered the race variations referred to in the passage last quoted, for the considerations therein mentioned.

To this it may be at once replied that even man often has _several_ distinct intentions and motives for a _single_ action, and the theist has no difficulty in supposing that, out of an infinite number of motives, the motive mentioned in each case may have been an exceedingly subordinate one.

The theist, though properly attributing to God what, for want of a better term, he calls "purpose" and "design," yet affirms that the limitations of human purposes and motives are by no means applicable to the Divine "purposes." Out of many, say a thousand million, reasons for the institution of the laws of the physical universe, some few are to a certain extent conceivable by us; and amongst these the benefits, material and moral, accruing from them to men, and to each individual man in every circumstance of his life, play a certain, perhaps a very subordinate, part.[263] As Baden Powell observes, "How can we {260} undertake to affirm, amid all the possibilities of things of which we confessedly know so little, that a thousand ends and purposes may not be answered, because we can trace none, or even imagine none, which seem to our short-sighted faculties to be answered in these particular arrangements ?"[264] The objection to the bull-dog's ferocity in connexion with "man's brutal sport" opens up the familiar but vast question of the existence of evil, a problem the discussion of which would be out of place here.