belief that all animals and plants have descended from one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless, all living things have much in common-in their chemical composition, their cellular structure, their laws of growth, and their liability to injurious influences. We see this even in so trifling a circumstance as that the same poison often similarly affects plants and animals; or that the poison secreted by the gall-fly produces monstrous growths on the wild rose or oak tree. In all organic beings the union of a male and female elemental cell seems occasionally to be necessary for the production of a new being. In all, as far as is at present known, the germinal vesicle is the same. So that every individual organic being starts from a common origin. If we look even to the two main divisions, namely, to the animal and vegetable kingdoms, certain low forms are so far intermediate in character that naturalists have disputed to which kingdom they should be referred; and, as Professor Asa Gray has remarked, "The spores and other reproductive bodies of many of the lower alga may claim to have first a characteristically animal, and then an unequivocally vegetable existence.' Therefore on the principle of natural selection with divergence of character, it does not seem incredible that, from some such low and intermediate form, both animals and plants may have been developed; and if we admit this, we must admit that all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth may have. descended from some one primordial form. But this inference is chiefly grounded on analogy, and it is immaterial whether or not it be accepted. The case is different with the members of each great class, as the vertebrata, the articulata, &c.; for here, as has just been remarked, we have in the laws of homology and embryology, &c., distinct evidence that all have descended from a single parent."

Mr. Darwin, therefore, with every concession that we might make that he had established his law of the origin of species by the law of natural selection, is obliged to lead us back toan origin, to a creation, of animal and vegetable life for which his law supplies no substitute. Mr. Baden Powell's assumption of Darwin's law as a proof of the self-evolving uncreated powers of nature, is but a type of the loose, inaccurate mode of reasoning by which our faith in a Creator is sought to be unsettled. Professor Huxley follows in the same manner in his paper "On the Methods and Results of Ethnology," in the Fortnightly Review. He treats the belief that God created Adam and Eve, and that all mankind are descended from them, with lofty philosophical scorn. He calls the theory of Adam's creation, Adamitic monogenism. He says, "Five-sixths of the public are taught this Adamitic

monogenism, as if it were an established truth, and believe it. I do not; and I am not acquainted with any man of science or duly instructed person who does." Now, why does Professor Huxley reject this doctrine? Is it because the sciences of physiology and comparative anatomy, which he has cultivated with such success, and with such deserved distinction, compel him to reject the theory of the descent of the human race from a single pair? No. He admits that science presents him with no difficulty in accepting this doctrine. What is it, then, he rejects? Man's creation. And why? Because he considers it unphilosophical to admit the idea of creation; and he thinks Mr. Darwin's law of the origin of species enables him to evade this unphilosophical idea. "The whole tendency," he asserts, "of modern science is to thrust the origination of things further and further into the background; and the chief philosophical objection to Adam being, not his oneness, but the hypothesis of his special creation; the multiplication of that objection tenfold is, whatever it may look, an increase, instead of a diminution, of the difficulties of the case. And as to the second alternative, it may safely be affirmed that, even if the differences between men are specific, they are so small that the assumption of more than one primitive stock for all is altogether superfluous. Surely no one can now be found to assert that any two stocks of mankind differ as much as a chimpanzee and an orang do; still less that they are as unlike as either of these is to any New World Simian? Lastly, the granting of the polygenist premises does not, in the slightest degree, necessitate the polygenist conclusion. Admit that Negroes and Australians, Negritos and Mongols are distinct species, or distinct genera, if you will, and you may yet, with perfect consistency, be the strictest of monogenists, and even believe in Adam and Eve as the primeval parents of mankind. It is to Mr. Darwin we owe this discovery; it is he who, coming forward in the guise of an eclectic philosopher, presents his doctrine as the key to ethnology, and as reconciling and combining all that is good in the Monogenistic and Polygenistic schools. It is true that Mr. Darwin has not, in so many words, applied his views to ethnology; but even he who reads' the Origin of Species' can hardly fail to do so."

runs and

It is by such loose, illogical, unphilosophical reasoning, such acceptation of crude hypotheses as demonstrated laws, that we are to accept the "chain of endless causation" as eliminating even the idea of creation and a Creator from the universe. But this will appear more strongly still if we pass from the origin of vitality on the earth to the origin of the world itself by the self-evolving powers of nature. This leads us up at once to

E

the Nebular hypothesis.

Of unformed star-dust; of a fire mist, revolving fiercely on its axis, slowly cooling and throwing off planets and comets from the refrigerating mass of a sun. But whence this mist, this great heat? Professor Tyndall, in his "Constitution of the Universe," leads us back to " ages ago, when the elementary constituents of our rocks clashed together and produced the motion of heat." But whence, ages ago, the atoms constituting the elementary particles of these rocks? Whence the force that caused them to clash together? He is silent. The chain of endless causation snaps asunder: he confesses that he knows no more of the origin of force than he does of the origin of matter. But where our modern English professors hesitate, Mr. Collingwood has put forth Dr. Louis Büchner's views on "Force and Matter" in an English dress to enable us boldy to elicit truth and to overthrow prejudice. Here, without any shrinking, shall we find the "chain of endless causation" carried to its legitimate conclusions.

Dr. Büchner sets forth in the strongest terms the immortality, indestructibility, infinity, and imperishability of matter and its twin attendant force. He teaches us that matter is not inferior to, but the peer of, spirit. He laughs to scorn not only the idea of a Creator, but a God. "Nature," he tells us, "knows neither a supernatural beginning nor a supernatural continuance. Nature, the all-engendering and alldevouring, is its own beginning and end, birth and death. She produced man by her own power, and takes him again." Nature, not God. He knows no God but man's self-idealization. Verily Dr. Büchner would have us eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, that we might be as gods. He quotes, with approbation, the saying of Ludwig Feuerbach, "An extraneous and superhuman god is nothing but an extraneous and supernatural self, a subjective being, placed, by transgressing its limits, above the objective nature of man.' And how, getting rid of a creator, does he give us the origin of man or vitality on the earth? "There was a time," he asserts, "when the earth-a fiery globe-was not merely incapable of producing living beings, but was hostile to the existence of vegetable and animal organisms. It was only after having cooled down, and after the precipitation of the watery vapours which surrounded it, that the crust of the earth assumed a form which, in its further development, rendered the existence of various organic beings possible."

"The facts of science prove, with considerable certainty, that the organic beings which people the earth owe their origin and propagation solely to the conjoined action of natural forces, and that the gradual change and development of the

surface of the earth are the sole, or at least the chief, cause of the gradual increase of the living world." Here, then, we come to the plain expression that all the beauty, order, and wisdom displayed in God's universe is its own creator, own sustainer; nothing but law, no wisdom, no design. Such empty notions and innocent studies Dr. Büchner leaves to those who delight to contemplate nature rather with the eyes of the feelings than with those of the intellect. Where, then, does the vain endeavour to evade mystery in nature,-for that, and that alone, leads to the denial of the miraculous in nature,-lead us? To the acceptance of something far more unsatisfactory-to the proud reason of man. Well might Dr. Arnold say, "Here is the moral fault of unbelief-that a man can bear to make so great a moral sacrifice as is implied in renouncing God. He makes the greatest moral sacrifice to obtain partial satisfaction to his intellect. A believer ensures the greatest moral perfection, with partial satisfaction to his intellect also; entire satisfaction to the intellect is and can be obtained by neither."

And why, I ask, cannot the believer obtain entire satisfaction for his intellect? Because the finite cannot comprehend the infinite.

We see, therefore, that the rationalistic principle of law without a lawgiver, invented for the purpose of explaining away all that is miraculous, if carried out must lead us to the conclusion, that there is not an intelligent author of nature, and natural governor of the world. This is the position in which modern science is asserted to oppose revelation. We are called upon to reject that which Bishop Butler, in his "Analogy," deemed unnecessary of proof. For he takes it as "proved, that there is an intelligent author of nature, and natural governor of the world. For as there is no presumption against this prior to the proof of it, so it has been often proved with accumulated evidence-from this argument of analogy and final causes; from abstract reasonings; from the most ancient tradition and testimony; and from the general consent of mankind."

The more intimately the laws of nature have been investigated, the more clearly has it been demonstrated that they are not founded on chance. They manifest that they are the arbitrary enactments of a supreme will, and founded on a wisdom which, so far as we can comprehend it, manifests its perfectness. Surely Newton may reasonably be a guide in natural philosophy? We need not fear to follow him lest we be considered unscientific. "Later philosophers," says he, in those remarkable queries he appends to his Optics, "banish the consideration of such a

cause out of natural philosophy, feigning hypotheses for explaining all things mechanically, and referring other causes to metaphysics. Whereas, 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 very first cause, which certainly is not mechanical; and not only to unfold the mechanism of the world, but chiefly to resolve these and suchlike questions. What is there in places almost empty of matter, and whence is it that the sun and planets gravitate towards one another without dense matter between them? Whence is it that Nature doth nothing in vain; and whence arises all that order and beauty which we see in the world? To what end are comets? and whence is it that planets move ail one and the same way in orbs concentric, while comets move all manner of ways in orbs very eccentric? and what hinders the fixed stars from falling upon one another? How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so much art, and for what ends were their several parts? Was the eye contrived without skill in optics, and the ear without knowledge of sounds? How do the motions of the body follow from the will? and whence is the instinct in animals? Is not the sensory of animals that place to which the sensitive substance is present, and into which the sensible species of things are carried through the nerves and brain, that there they may be perceived by their immediate presence to that substance? And these things being rightly despatched, does it not appear from phenomena that there is a being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite space, as it were in his sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself? Of which things the images only carried through the organs of sense into our little sensoriums, are there seen and beheld by that which in us perceives and thinks. And though every true step made in this philosophy brings us not immediately to the knowledge of the First Cause, yet it brings us nearer to it, and on that account is to be highly valued."

Now, Newton here insists on an axiom as impossible to be evaded as any axiom of mathematical or mechanical science. That there is such an overwhelming evidence of design manifested wherever we can trace the laws of nature; that this design compels us to admit beyond all these laws as their originator and ruler, an all-wise, omnipotent Lawgiver, and ever-present Ruler. And this he carries out most fully in his "Principia," where, showing that "the planets and comets will indeed persevere in their orbs by the laws