p. 154You were next to speak of the relation of God to His works. You said you saw strong indications of His participation in the operations of the universe. This is what I wish to see above all.—Well, in what way could you expect to recognize them? You used the illustration of a great factory and its proprietor. You will, of course, admit that such an illustration could only apply in part. There is not the same connection between a factory and its proprietor, or even its actual builder, that there is between God and His works. A factory proprietor or builder does not use any part of himself in the putting-up of the place, nor does the machinery derive its motion from his personal energy in any sense. His intelligence has enabled him to put together things and conditions that act and re-act on each other; but he himself is altogether separate from and outside the fabric. He is not in it or it in him in the way that the universe p. 155 is in the Universal Power that has contrived and upholds it.
That is, of course, obvious, and constitutes a great difference.—It is a difference so great as to make illustration between the one and the other impossible. The tokens of God’s relation to His works cannot be the same as the tokens of a man’s relation to a factory he has built. Yet they are in a measure the same, and certainly not less palpable when fairly seen.
How would you define them?—Well, although the cases are not exactly the same, we may be helped by using the one to ascend to the other. How would you know that a particular factory that you had never seen before owed its existence to the contrivance and superintendence of a proprietor, but by this simple rule that factories do not make themselves, and that you see the owner take occasional part in its management?
That would be about the rule; but do you think the same rule holds good in the higher matters?—Undoubtedly.
It does not seem to me so.—The only difference is the greater size and range of the facts and the wider knowledge needed to perceive them. It is not so readily obvious that a world does not make itself and does not manage itself as that a factory does not make itself and manage itself; but it is as powerfully obvious when the eye takes in enough.
I should like to know how you make that out.—Well, from the small, reason to the great. Take the wing of a bird. Here is a contrivance for enabling a creature to rise in the air, and direct its course at will in that highly innavigable element—the one performance that man most desires, and is most unable to accomplish. The mechanism by p. 156 which the bird accomplishes this is the cleverest invention you can imagine. Man’s contrivances are nothing in comparison with it. The make of the feathers, the stuff of which they are made, for lightness and compactness and toughness; the position in which they are inserted in the muscles of the wing; the relation between the nearly invisible nerves of the powerful muscles that enable the creature to move and twist and curve the feathers exactly in the ways required by the mechanical properties of the atmosphere, of which the bird knows nothing, all shew the most intelligent adjustments of intricate conditions to the necessities of a most difficult problem. It is not possible to conceive a more perfect evidence of the participation of contriving intelligence in adapting means to ends. A watch is nothing to it; a watch is a mere adjustment of parts to the requirements of mechanical impulse supplied by spring or pendulum. Here is a machine of life adjusted to the most difficult and most beautiful form of motion existing in the universe, and furnished with the most elaborate and minute appliances to that end. My proposition is, we have just the same reason for saying the bird did not make itself as for saying the factory did not make itself; and as man did not make it, the question presses—who?
Yes, but I don’t quite see the conclusiveness of that. There is a great difference between the bird and the factory in one particular: the bird is a growth—the factory is not.
That is a great difference, doubtless; but it is a difference that only strengthens the argument as shewing the inconceivably superior methods of the intelligence that has produced the bird.—I fail to see that. p. 157 Well, as you say, the bird is a growth; but from what?—From an egg.
Have you considered what a wonderful fact that is—that from a mass of formless albumen in an egg, a perfect mechanical apparatus like a wing should be produced?—Yes, it is a wonderful fact; but the question is the origin of the fact.
To get at that, you must go back. The egg did not produce the bird by any wisdom the egg had—for it has none. Whatever bias and complication of invisible magnetic forces latent in it developed the organization of the bird, was derived from a previous bird. And the previous bird came from a previous egg, and that from a previous bird, and that from a previous egg, and so on in a long previous chain. That, of course, you will admit.—Certainly.
Well, you get to the time when the process began; for there was a time when there was no bird on the earth. The question would be; how was the start made, by egg or bird? You never knew a bird that did not come from an egg, and you never knew an egg that did not come from a bird. Yet here was a time when there was neither bird nor egg. Yet they came. One or other of them must have come first. Which ever it was, you are in the presence of a problem which you can only solve by admitting the interposition of contriving intelligence. For if it was an egg that came first, there was no bird to make it, and somebody else must have made it. If it made itself, it was such a thing as never happens now, for all eggs come from birds; and if it was a bird that came first, you have the same difficulty, only greater if possible, for a bird with all its complicated and finely-adjusted vital mechanism presents itself to the mind as a more difficult p. 158 thing to produce than a crusted mass of albumen. Yet no bird was ever known to come into being except by the hatching of an egg. Contriving intelligence must have been at the start of the bird, for it bears every mark of contrivance and evidence of super-human skill. If there was no contriving intelligence at work, then a more wonderful miracle than creation happened; for Nature produced a perfect piece of mechanism without the sense to do it, and never did the same thing again that we ever heard of.—You put it strongly, I confess.
It is only the strength of the logic of the case. And it is not the whole of the case. Whether it were egg or bird that were first, consider the wonderful fact that the thing was contrived to reproduce itself in endless succession. The bird or the egg received a constitution which enabled it automatically to leave egg or bird of precisely the same sort. It would have been a stupendous feat of wisdom to produce a living bird, but think of making a bird that could produce eggs that would produce birds of the same sort! People are so familiar with the phenomenon that its extraordinary character, in most cases, fails to strike them. A man who produces a new machine of any kind that can do fine and useful work is considered a genius; but where is the man that can invent a machine that will make machines of its own sort without making it necessary for him to trouble himself again. And suppose a man could make such a machine, what would he think of the people who should say that because his machines went on making each other, therefore he did not make the first one that started the thing?—The idea is amusing.
Yet it is what has happened with the works of God. Because He has developed Nature on a self-working p. 159 principle, some people say, and many people think, He did not start Nature. The case of the bird and the egg is only one case. There are thousands like it, and I claim that they all yield as complete an indication of the participation of a contriving intelligence as the existence of a factory proves a builder and proprietor.—Perhaps you are right; but there is this other difference which you have not touched. The factory owner takes open part in the management, whereas in Nature, at all events so far as we see in our day, there is no evidence of the directing hand of Nature’s Proprietor.
I was coming to that; but we must leave that for another time.