world-making, to foresee that the human race would come into being in some future age, and that summer and winter, seed time and harvest, day and night, would consequently be a very convenient and agreeable arrangement for them? And foreseeing this, did it, or its inherent properties, dispose the order of things accordingly? If so, as we have observed, it is so very like intelligence, that the difference is not worth disputing about. Whoever can believe this, however, whoever can thus endow matter with intelligent properties or attributes, and ascribe to it all the marvelous order and adaptation of the universe, the skill, and wisdom, and benificence which meet us everywhere--such an one ought to be the last person in the world to talk about credulity, about others believing without evidence. 8. There remains now but one other refuge to which the sceptic can retreat, and that a desperate one. He may affirm at this point, that the whole may have been the result of mere accident or chance. Matter must necessarily have had some forms and dispositions, and they may as well have been such as they are, as any others! SECTION IV. AN EXAMINATION OF THE ARGUMENT FROM CHANCE. 1. It would seem that no supposition can be more unreasonable, than that which attributes to the effect of chance, the creation of the world, the organization of man, and other equally wonderful phenomena with which we are surrounded. It can hardly be credited, that even the wildest and most visionary fancy could have conceived such an extravagant idea.* "How long, says Bishop Tillotson, might twenty thousand blind men, who should be sent out from several remote parts of England, wander up and down, before they would all meet upon Salisbury Plain, and fall into rank and file in the exact order of an army? And yet, this is much more easy to be imagined, than how the innumerable blind parts of matter should rendezvous themselves into a world. How long might 66 a man be, in sprinkling colors upon canvass with a care *La Place has shown by a mathematical calculation, that the probability that the complicated motions of the solar system should have happened by chance, or without design and plan, without the operation of a superintending mind, is as 2 : 2a, or 2 to 4,398,046,511,103 Montesquieu says, "They who assert that a blind fataliity produced the various effects we behold in this world, talk very absurdly; for can anything be more unreasonable than to pretend that a blind fatality could be productive of intelligent beings ?--Spirit of Laws, Book I, chap. i, near the beginning. less hand, before they would happen to make the exact picture of a man? And is a man easier made by chance than his picture ?" 2. Its absurdity and absolute impossibility will be fully seen, if we attempt to make a single practical application of it. Let us consider, for example, what chance must have accomplished before it could have made a man. To have effected this, it must have happened that bone formed itself, and then assumed the shape of a globe-matter must have accidentally combined in such a remarkable manner as to have produced brain, and then must have chanced to fall into the globe of bone- and so came the head. This needed eyes, ears, &c., and consequently a most astounding concurrence of atoms must have happened to result in the formation of an eye, with all its complicate apparatus for vision; and stranger still, by another most skillfully fortuitous circumstance, there happened to come up another eye, a perfect fac-simile of the former; and then, very fortunately, both happened to drop right into the sockets which happened to be made for them. Other atoms, following the example of those just named, fell to happening, and so brought forth two ears, which happened to jump into their respective places in the same way. Then came another lucky concourse, and gave birth to a nose, which very properly took its place where we find it. And finally, the whole atomic world happened to take the hint that a man was to be formed, and set fortuitously to work. Soon there appeared a portion of atoms ranging themselves under the nose in such way as to leave an opening for the mouth, and then the teeth, which other atoms had formed, came marching up in regular order, and, filing off at the entrance to right and left, took up their several positions in true military style, chance leading the van. In another quarter atoms happened to come together in the shape of sinews, muscles, nerves, vessels, &c., and set to forming one arm here and another there, hands, feet, legs, and so on to the end of the chapter. When these had all happened to be made, then, as by common consent, they happened to move towards each other, and, giving and receiving mutual salutations, united, and thus formed the frame of man. Then the blood happened to commence circulation, because the heart happened to take to contracting and dilating; and the lungs happened to draw in the air, because this happened to be indispensably necessary to the blood. But, more wonderful yet, just at this moment something happened to begin to think, and being pleased with it, kept on thinking, until, with the consent and co-operation of the body, it thought itself into a man. Such was the first feat of chance; but it did not stop here. As if to heap wonder upon wonder, and make that stranger which was strangest already, another routine of fortuitous concurrence casually happened, and proved to be precisely like the other, inasmuch as it ended in the production of another being of the same kind with the former.* This closed the drama, for certain it is that, for some unaccountable reason, chance has never attempted the thing since, nor made any approximation to it. 3. Will it be said by the sceptic that this is ridicule, that it is an unfair way of stating the question? If so, will he show how it can be more fairly stated? Indeed we have * Every one knows that there must have been originally a man and a woman; consequently chance must have hit twice on the same fortuitous concurrence. Suppose the man to have lived an hundred years, the woman must have been formed in that space of time. Admit the sceptic's assertion, that our race has existed millions of years-is it not queer, then, that chance should have been so fortunate, as to have produced this astonishing organization twice in the brief space of an hundred years, and in the long lapse of millions of ages should not have stumbled upon it again? nor even have hit upon an eye, or a hand, or a mouth, or some such trifle ? To us it is very queer. no conception of any method by which to explain the formation of man from chance, that will not make it appear in some such light as that in which we have just seen it. If it be ridiculous, it is owing to the subject itself, and not to the exposition of it. We frankly confess that we have not the power to make it more ludicrous than it really is. The unbeliever may complain, but he complains without cause; we have presented his theory in its true light, and if, when seen in its naked folly, he becomes ashamed of it, let him not say that it is ridicule, or that we have stated the case unfairly. There is no call for ridicule no necessity for forced argument. The idea that the human body, with its admirable and unequalled mechanism that the countless forms of animal and vegetable organization-that the world with all its harmony and beauty—the idea that these are but the effect of blind chance, carries upon its very face an absurdity too palpable to be made more so by borrowed ridicule. 4. It will avail nothing here to say, that matter must have had some forms, and that they were as likely to be such as they are as any other. This is but a refuge of words; it does not remove the absurdity. Because matter must have had some forms, does it follow that these must have been an eye, an ear, or a heart? If so, why should it not take the form of a cotton factory, a steam engine, or even a stage coach? There are an hundred probabilities for either of these, to one for a man. Or, if the planetary system owes its existence to the fact that matter must have had some form, why do we not see matter occa sionally taking the form of a twelve inch globe, or an orrery? This would be far easier for it. But suppose we grant that matter may have formed itself into an eye, does this prove that the eye must have taken its head? why not in the foot, or in the back? place in the Or, if matter took the form of a heart, why should this have been just |