PREFACE.

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THE outcome of modern scientific speculation, connected with the system of religious faith deducible from God's Word, is likely to prove beneficial to the human family.

Having enjoyed the opportunity of weighing the intellectual products of those who have enriched the nineteenth century, we presume to invite the reader to accompany us in an examination of some of the conclusions reached. Whilst conceding that evolution may give a new impulse to embodied christianity, relieving it of some objectionable features, furnishing attractive arguments in its favor, and teaching the church how to employ new agencies in the elevation of humanity, the writer has undertaken to present an argument against those forms of the evolutional theory which seem to tend towards atheism. We have endeavored to cover the entire field as connected with the origin of man, of matter, of force, of life, of mentality, of conscience. While there is difficulty in believing it possible that man's physical nature is an evolution from the lower animals, and still greater difficulty in imagining that his intellectual faculties may be, it is apparently impossible

to conceive that his moral and religious nature could have been evolved from animals destitute of even their

germs.

The origin of man, however, is by no means the only obstacle to the acceptance of atheistic forms of evolution. If all life evolved from a few primordial germs, can we conceive the possibility of results so numerous and so diverse from causes so insignificant? Can an "organless speck of plasson" develop the myriad forms of animal and vegetable life? Is a Superintending Intelligence entirely unnecessary?

Again: ere evolution is entitled to be regarded as a theory capable of furnishing an explanation of the universe, it ought to account for the origin of matter, which bears evidence of having had a genesis external to itself. This done, it should show that there has been no break in continuity, each present growing naturally out of its antecedent past;-and that a series of changes such as evolution predicates may be infinite.

This advanced theory meets also with difficulties when it comes to questions involved in the term Life. Is life mere mechanism? Is it a mode of motion? Is it the aggregated life of an infinite number of infinitesimal bioplasts? Is it molecules of matter braided together in inexplicable ways? Is it one side of that "doublefaced unity" matter, whose other side is physical? If there is no Personal God, then life, like matter and force, is an insoluble enigma.

Once more: if evolution is to assume the role of

omnipotence, it should show itself competent to evolve man's faculties,-the intellect, the sensibilities, and the will, from matter or from physical force; that is, it ought to prove that mind and matter are identical, thought being corpuscular emanations from fibers vibrating under tension, or that mind is a product of matter; or that mind and the ordinary physical forces are identical, or that the former is a product of the latter. It is asked to present incontrovertible evidence that the brain is not the organ of the mind, but is the mind itself, or is the efficient cause of which mind is but an effect. It must then prove that all mental activity is strictly automatic, man being under an inexorable necessity, his motives, his processes of reasoning, his volitions being formed for him, not by him.

There is no conflict between Science and the Bible. They agree in regarding the Divine Will as the originating cause of all things, in conceding that there has been development, in admitting that there have been breaks in the ordinarily continuous flow of events, in believing that the present arrangements of nature must have had a beginning and will have an end, and in attributing the continued existence of the universe to a Power above nature.

We hope the volume shall evince the existence of mentality as an entity distinct from matter, for it is inconceivable that oatmeal and beefsteak were so transmuted by the ordinary physical forces that a relentless necessity elaborated and launched this argument upon

the troubled waters of modern discussion. We prefer to believe that will-force had something to do with its production, and that this will-force was not a product of the granary and the meat-market. The book is a witness, we imagine, to the fact that necessity, generated in gross atoms, has not extinguished individual liberty.

THE AUTHOR.

INTRODUCTION.

SINCE the appearance of Charles Darwin's great work, The Origin of Species, the general doctrine of evolution, in one or other of its many forms, has been very generally accepted by scientists as representing the view they have come to take of the operations of nature. This general conception of evolution is as old as human speculation, but it has only now been associated with accurate scientific methods, as a working hypothesis, and its truth supposed to be verified by actual proof. It is typified by the gradual growth under proper conditions of the chicken out of the egg; of the tree out of the seed; of the foetus out of the germ; of the man out of the babe; and the solar systems, with their suns, planets, and satelites in various stages of consolidation and refrigeration, out of the original nebula, "without form and void," to which Scripture as well as Science traces back the birth of the material universe. The things that are, proceed out of the things that were, and in turn give birth to the things that are to be, in unbroken continuity and imperceptible transitions, through the operation of natural laws. This is the very meaning of the old familiar term "Nature," that which is born, and that which gives