never more clearly or frankly put than in these few words. Pantheism is here packed into a nutshell: the seen is the measure of the possible; what this or the other man can conceive is the limit of what Deity can do! 66 Flash intelligence in a second across the Atlantic!" how confidently, some twenty years ago, the mass of civilized mankind, in the measurement of the power of a fellow-creature, would have poured scorn on the mention of such a project! There are regions in which reticence is still more prudent, and temerity still more rash. Mr. Darwin has been sitting at wise men's feet; but he has failed to drink in the spirit of their teaching. Bacon, for instance, would have counselled him that it is better to rest in ignorance of one order of facts than to strain after a spurious knowledge by the distortion of another. Bacon would have warned him that the opposing a metaphysical perplexity to the witness of nature, and the torturing that witness into a means of solution, was disloyalty to the lessons of the inductive philosophy. Bacon, and not less sensitively Newton, would have shrunk from the implied antithesis which dethrones from the rank of Verified Cause the Causa causarum Himself, and passes by the Author of the Cosmos as a spectre of the brain. "I had rather believe all the

fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.

It is true that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion; for while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no farther; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate, and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity."78 "The main business of natural philosophy

is to argue from phenomena without feigning hypotheses, and to deduce causes from effects, till we come to the First Cause, which is certainly not mechanical.” 74

34. In shutting out the Creator, then, from direct or conscious causative agency in the Origin of Species, and contrasting ordinary causes as vera with the chimerical cause, GOD, the champions of transmutation are not fighting in the Baconian ranks, nor entitled to the shelter of the Baconian shield. Some things we know, and some we know not; but, if Bacon be our guide, we shall never contort the conquests of our knowledge in order to assuage the cravings of our ignorance. Into the workshop-the officina-of Deity we are not permitted to pry. Wisdom was with Him in the begin

ning, but we were not. Against us that laboratory, in which He wielded the forces of matter, and presided over the chemistry of incipient life, presents never-opening doors. What the phenomena impose is the reference of their origin, not to a self-evolving capacity, but to a Creative Intelligence. How that Intelligence wrought, is a problem with which the foremost knowledge of our time, in the absence of the appropriate data, declines to grapple.75 True science, when it does not see, is not forward to speak. Enough that, to all spiritual intents and purposes, the problem is of only secondary interest. Creative Will might use, or might dispense with, preexistent receptacles and channels of vitality; but each new form, under either supposition, would be directly due, not to natural processes, but to "the finger of God." It may be that, in the less signal steps of the upward procession, the Creator employed the earlier structure as the nidus or matrix of the later; as, for instance, in the variations of closely allied forms, if these be truly specific, throughout the Chalk or the Lias. But the grand typical ascensions best accord with the hypothesis, not only of creation proper, which this still would be, but also of creation apart. In the oldest of all "Origins" of Species, man is drawn from

the dust, with no ministerial substructure, and no preparatory scaffolding, responsive to the moulding will of One to Whom nothing is impossible, and Who measures not His power by our puny perplexities. In the origin so shadowed, amidst the shining light of nature as to the divinity of the fact, and the deep darkness of nature as to the choice of the method, we may still be content to believe.

35. If Mr. Darwin is perplexed, however, let him be consistent in his perplexity. The true question at issue is, Shall we account for the universe, and its vital phenomena, with God, or without Him? In instructive closeness of context to the famous challenge to show how elemental atoms could "flash into living tissues," Mr. Darwin speaks, as if the exploded lessons of Genesis were still lingering in his mind, of that solitary form of far primordial being into which "life was first breathed by the Creator." 76 It seems, then, that this achievement, this unique "flashing" from atomic lifelessness into organic life, was not ultra vires of the Almighty. Can our author acquaint us further what an atom is? Or how many atoms on this occasion were called into play? Or at what point of their muster, in more exuberant array and more elaborate combinations, the power of

the Highest must have shrunk checkmated from the control of them? Can anything within the compass of human understanding be more self-evident than that no man is free to part the problem involved in Origin of Species from that involved in Origin of Life? If nature cannot initiate Life, why must she be set to initiate Species? If the Creator may not be postulated at the birthday of Species, why must He be postulated at the birthday of Life? You require a Divine power for

Life: "dead matter would be for ever dead if He did not quicken it:" why not refer Species to that same power? Either this is a mere façon de parler, which gives the name "Creator" to Natural Law as a passing sop to vulgar prejudice, unripe as yet for the lesson that electricity will account for aboriginal life, as the ape for intellectual man, and that if nature can give us a man from a protozoon she may give us a protozóón out of nothing; or else Mr. Darwin concedes his whole case. His scheme is not forced on him by observation of nature; but he forces it on nature in obedience to a metaphysical difficulty. And to what does that difficulty amount? Is it rational to ascribe a mode of action to the Creator in the imaginary strata beneath Siluria which it is irrational to connect with the Oolite or the