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has been such a gradual reduction of all phenomena of nature within the sphere of established law that this principle must be received as a truth. It is, however, but the revival of Hume's celebrated objection to miracles. "A miracle," says Hume, "is a violation of the laws of nature, and a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws: the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined." I will not stop here to show that this assumption of Hume's has been proved again and again to involve the very facts which are in dispute. That, if even one miracle has happened, which is the point in discussion, then Hume's proposition must fall to the ground, for it cannot be contrary to experience. Nor need I remark for those so much inclined to bow to the authority of great names, that the progress of the reduction of the phenomena of nature within the sphere of established law between the time when Newton wrote his "Principia" and his "Optics," and that when Hume wrote his famous treatise on Miracles, was not so great as to have any material influence on the important question of the credibility of miracles. Yet Newton, who more than any other man had the most profound conviction of the existence of natural laws, was not compelled on that account to reject his belief in miracles, or that greatest of all miracles the creation of the physical world by an omnipotent Creator, and His support of all things by His ever-watchful domination and providence. Those who try to divorce the conception of a Creator and Ruler of the Universe from our views of the physical world, the world of matter, and would restrict the reception of the marvellous entirely to the spiritual world, evade the example of Newton by the assertion, that he, who made the greatest step ever made by the inductive philosophy, was destitute of its true spirit.

The advance of the inductive philosophy since the days of Newton may have opened up a wider region of law in the physical universe. We know of other forces than those of gravitation and light. But what progress have we made in bringing these within the domain of law expressed in mathematical terms enabling us to anticipate by these laws unknown phenomena and facts of nature? If, therefore, the man who more than any other, by his clear and vigorous intellect, has reduced the widest range of phenomena within the sphere of established law, did not, on that account, feel compelled as a consequence to reject the miraculous, we may well ask why we, as students of Nature's laws, must as a matter of rational necessity be required to do so.

It will be instructive, however, to trace the effect of this

assumed axiom, rejected by Newton, that the reduction of the phenomena of nature to established laws compels the rejection of the miraculous.

What we call a law of nature is nothing more than a general formula enabling us to class together under one head a certain number of observed phenomena. We must not let this term "law" lead us into metaphysical or illogical conclusions. Because we class together a certain number of facts under what we term a law, we have no certainty that that law is a necessary, unalterable, unchangeable power, controlling the observed phenomena. That because the law of gravitation enables us to account for certain motions of the planetary bodies, their satellites and the comets of our system, the proved existence of this law must compel us to believe that it, as well as the bodies it controls, existed through the infinite ages of the past without a creator: a law without a lawgiver, controlling matter without a creator; gravitation being a self-sustaining, self-evolving power of self-existent, uncreated matter. I put this proposition in this startling point of view, because it is precisely the point of view in which it has been imported from the disputes of rationalistic theologians into the domain of science.

Strauss asserts that a miracle is an impossibility, because the "chain of endless causation can never be broken." Now, nothing but infinite experience or infinite observation of all the laws of nature, through an infinite period of time, could prove the assertion that the chain of endless causation can never be broken.

What we call a law of nature is but the observation of a certain number of facts which we class under a certain formula; a certain number of facts, for instance, under the law of gravitation. But gravitation is not, for anything we know, a necessary law, a necessary and invariable property of what we call gravitating matter. Phenomena might present themselves which might refuse to be classed under this law, and we should have to amend it. This has not only been conceded; but the calculating machine, as described by Babbage, gives us a mechanical demonstration that no sequence of phenomena, however great or long observed, can assure us that at any instant the chain of the law may not be broken."

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The acceptance of such a position as a chain of endless causation" must not only destroy the idea of a living and ruling God; but also the existence of man's will, which cannot be exerted without a breach of this chain of endless causation. This "chain of endless causation" was popularized for the purpose of spreading the results of rationalism in this

country by the late Mr. Baden Powell, in his "Christianity without Judaism," "The Order of Nature," and his essay "On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity," in "Essays and Reviews."

Admitting that the allowance of one miracle is as efficient, a demolition of the axiom of the "chain of endless causation " as a thousand; that the creation of the universe, or the creation of man, or the creation of any living being must most undoubtedly be regarded as a miracle; that where there is a commencement of the chain of causation, which creation must be, the chain cannot be endless he therefore strove with all his might to deny a creation. "In Christianity without Judaism," he tells us that the facts of geology compel us "uninterruptedly to extend the domain of natural order through the infinity of past time." "That everything has gone on from one age to another, through the countless periods of past duration to the depths of primeval time, in the same unbroken chain of regular changes;" and, again, that the Biblical account of creation is a parable or fiction designedly untrue. These assertions with respect to creation he repeats again and again in his "Order of Nature;" indeed, it is the dominant thought throughout most of the volume. In "Essays and Reviews," he tells us, "that the simple but grand truth of the law of conservation, and the stability of the heavenly motions, now well understood by all sound cosmical philosophers, is but the type of the universal self-sustaining and self-evolving powers which pervade all nature;" and when we ask whether living beings were created, or whether they have existed in an unbroken endless chain of causation through the infinite ages of the past, he satisfies our curiosity by telling us that "it is now acknowledged, under the high sanction of the name of Owen, that 'creation' is only another name for our ignorance of the mode of production; and it has been the unanswered and unanswerable argument of another reasoner that new species must have originated either out of their inorganic elements, or out of previously organized forms; either development or spontaneous generation must be true; while a work has now appeared by a naturalist of the most acknowledged authority, Mr. Darwin's masterly volume on the Origin of Species by the law of 'natural selection,' which now substantiates on undeniable grounds the very principle so long denounced by the first naturalists, the origination of new species by natural causes; a work which must soon bring about an entire revolution of opinion in favour of the self-evolving powers of nature.”

Instead, therefore, of creation, Mr. Baden Powell gives us the self-evolving powers of nature acting on uncreated matter.

When we ask for proof, we are referred to Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species by the Law of Natural Selection." Now I will venture to assert that no one can say, after a careful study of Mr. Darwin's work, that he has even claimed to have incontrovertibly proved the existence of his law. At the best it is but an hypothesis, not an established law. Confessedly the majority of known facts in nature are irreconcilable with it. When Mr. Darwin is asked for the proofs of the first steps of his process of animal improvement and transmutation, he refers us to the undiscovered strata of unknown geological periods. Even then he carries his improved law only up to some three or four forms of animal and vegetable life as the points from whence animated nature has sprung, not in an endless, but a finite chain of causation. He gives no law for the appearance of vitality amid inorganic life, and shirks the origin of this as foreign to the question.

Mr. Darwin was an admirer of Mr. Powell, and, doubtless, would willingly follow him as far as he could in his theory of no creation. In the historical sketch prefixed to the third edition of his "Origin of Species," he asserts that "the philosophy of creation has been treated in a masterly manner by the Rev. Baden Powell," and attributes to Mr. Powell the anticipation of much of his own theories. "Nothing," he says, can be more striking than the manner in which he shows that the introduction of new species is a regular, not a casual, phenomenon; or, as Sir John Herschel expresses it, a natural in contradistinction to a miraculous process.' The law of endless causation, which, in Mr. Baden Powell's opinion, is to bring about such an entire revolution of opinion,-the law which is to substitute the self-evolving powers of nature for the power of an omnipotent Creator,-is no other than the "law of the origination of new species by natural causes;' those natural causes being the destruction of weaker races by the stronger in the battle of life. Now this proposition has only to be stated in naked terms to carry with it its own manifest contradiction. The destruction of life in the battle of life necessarily takes for granted the previous existence of life. Therefore this law,-even granting it proved, which it has not been,―does not carry us back to the self-evolving powers of nature for the first production of life. Mr. Darwin himself would seem to repudiate any such deduction from his own law. "A celebrated author and divine," he states, "has written to me that he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh

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act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws." But this subject is so important, and such a use has been made of Mr. Darwin's theory in the endeavour to evade the idea that the commencement of life, animal or vegetable, must be an act of the Creator, that I may be permitted to examine what Mr. Darwin himself puts forth as the limits of his own theory. "These authors," he says, "seem no more startled at a miraculous act of creation than at an ordinary birth. But do they really believe that at innumerable periods in the earth's history certain elemental atoms have been commanded into living tissues? Do they believe that at each supposed act of creation one individual or many were produced? Were all the infinitely numerous kinds of animals and plants created as eggs, or seed, or as full grown? And in the case of mammals, were they created bearing the false marks of nourishment from the mother's womb? Undoubtedly these same questions cannot be answered by those who, under the present state of science, believe in the creation of a few aboriginal forms, or of some one form of life. It has been asserted by several authors that it is as easy to believe in the creation of a hundred million beings as of one: but Maupertius's philosophical axiom of least action' leads the mind more willingly to admit the smaller number; and certainly we ought not to believe that innumerable beings within each great class have been created with plain, but deceptive, marks of descent from a single parent. It may be asked how far I extend the doctrine of the modification of species. The question is difficult to answer, because the more distinct the forms are which we may consider, by so much the arguments fall away in force. But some arguments of the greatest weight extend very far. All the members of whole classes can be connected together by chains of affinities, and all can be classified on the same principle in groups subordinate to groups. Fossil remains sometimes tend to fill up very wide intervals between existing orders. Organs in a rudimentary condition plainly show that an early progenitor had the organ in a fully developed state; and this in some instances necessarily implies an enormous amount of modification in .the descendants. Throughout whole classes various structures are formed on the same pattern, and at an embryonic age the species closely resemble each other. Therefore I cannot doubt that the theory of descent with modification embraces all the members of the same class. I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.

Analogy would lead me one step farther, namely, to the

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