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fully understood. Not, of course, that the strange obtrusive anomalies with which nature, "red in tooth and claw," is replete, have had more-but this is much-than the moral uses they possibly subserve more clearly discerned, and their anomalous character more carefully defined. We are certainly inclined to think that those evidences of natural evil which have led to such arraignments of the actual order of nature as have come to us from J. S. Mill, Hartmann, and others, have pressed not less heavily on our late theistic thinking, which, as it appears to us, has really felt more profoundly than ever the perplexing problem so presented to it. For recent theistic philosophy sees clearly enough that the time has gone by when it can, even if it would, shirk the difficulties presented in what Nature, tormenting and devouring, with, according to Mill, "the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice," offers to our view. It is to be plainly said that there must be no blinking the strange sad facts of plague and tempest, of dearth and disaster, of disease and death, which can, to no natural scrutiny, be evidential of any particularly benevolent Deity. Even as to man,

we must behold him

"Stretched in disease's shapes abhorred,

Or mown in battle by the sword."

But we claim for that philosophy that it has more carefully distinguished the suffering animal world

from the world of suffering man, recognising in how many different ways the former is exempt from troubles that belong to man as a being gifted with rational foresight, and beset with so many hopes and fears. We believe it has more successfully shown how the seeming rapacities and cruelties of earth mean for man but such wholesome severity as may compel him to spiritual advance. We claim for it, too, that it has done more to vindicate and explain these painful conditions as involved in the slow working, towards good and worthy ends, of the law of growth or progress. Nature, no doubt, may seem to threaten or crush the good man equally with the wicked, but it has surely come to be better understood how little of sweet reasonableness there can be in our reaping the untold advantages that spring out of nature's uniformity, without making allowance for some disadvantageous aspects and incidental evils in a world where all things are finite. Recent theistic philosophy has rightly protested against thought fixing its gaze with such intensity on any possible residuum of shadow or mystery which may remain after every discrimination and abatement, that for it, purblind, there shall exist in vain the multiplied and diverse proofs of creative goodness, the exquisite and infinite tokens of end, harmony, and ideal purpose. It has recalled us to the fact that ultimate ends are not ours to scan, as though the whole groundplan of creation lay before our view. It does not

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suffer us to forget that it does not seem as if we had any right to expect complete beneficence in the life that now is ours, where everything is relative, and where God's final purposes with us are so largely hid from view. It has more wisely insisted upon the immeasurable importance of moral discipline and spiritual evolution in the history of the world, as against the mere background of pleasure or happiness or justice. It has emphasised the difficulty of those, who are such interested parties, as we, being any impartial or capable judges of what is wise and good in Divine methods of compassing that moral and spiritual growth in man which is of prime moment to an ethical philosophy that stands about as high above the classic utilitarianism of Mill as the heavens are above the earth. This universe as conditioned in suffering, waste, ignorance, and evil, is not only actual as Mr Morris so strongly insists, but is, in ways which we hardly think he and others fully realise, the only ideal universe-with all its progressive issues -that we can conceive. Yes, and extremely grave as are the difficulties and anomalies presented in such facts as sin and sorrow, disease and death, famine and catastrophe, yet these all become more intelligible to him for whom life means the subjection of the actual to the ideal, and they are illumined, as we believe, in forms that are higher than any that lie open to mere argument, to him who is enabled to live the life of progressive faith

in Christ, precisely as he does so. In the fearful strain between the ideal and the actual, we, for our part, believe the conscious and unswerving devotement to the spiritual and ideal a requisite of deep and ever-pressing urgency. We believe we are warranted in saying that such speculations on the origin of species as those of Darwin have been rightly caught up by theistic philosophy as really emphasising creation as a present process, in accordance with the better view of creation that prevails in modern theology. Our philosophy of theism has very properly insisted on the origination, and not merely the preservation, of variations being accounted for by any theory that would displace the theistic hypothesis, which keeps ever steadily before it the problem of the ruling Power in the Universe that now is. For, as has been said, "modification as modification is never a First, it is always process, movement between-movement of something into something." Yes; whereas the real quest is still one of origin, not modification.

Recent philosophy of theism, knowing the necessity of search into final causes to any large synthetic movement of thought, has maintained a theistic evolution in which design is not superfluous, at least to any comprehensive and thoroughgoing interpretation of the phenomena of nature and life. Professor Josiah Royce, in his 'Religious Aspect of Philosophy,' will have none of "empirical teleology," and with, it must be said, no overplus of

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philosophic calm, spurns all such notion of design as may be thought to be inwrought in the structure and story of created things; but while he has much to say on the "confused hum" of nature's voices, his own idealism has really gotten such invincible mastery that he is nowise free to note the real significance of voices that tell of unity and purpose. And the teleological character of nature in its totality is what recent theistic philosophy has with especial care and power emphasised, with a view to raising thought to the conception of one grand design which reaches over unbounded space and runs through unlimited time. This has been to enrich thought, through the inner or essential teleology involved in such a position, with a wider and worthier teleological view of the world, as an organism having an end in itself, than was possible to the older theory of it as a machine of so many parts, indwelt by no principle of life. Particular events, individual organisms, difficult, it may be, to reconcile with order and design, are seen to be less deservedly allowed to conflict with the evidence of harmony and design which recent thought has found in creation, taken in whole. We are not saying that teleological significance may not be attached to these, but we certainly are affirming that presentday philosophy of theism has found a more excellent way in the larger teleological sweep of its thought. Modern thought has, as already we have shown, purged the design argument of its old ex