true one,

that I am still allied to the angels and the child of God. Of this faith I cannot be bereaved, till I am convinced that all history is false, all testimony delusive, all the laws of evidence baseless. And should I be driven to that extremity of pyrrhonism, I will then turn upon the theorists, and deny their facts, which lie open to every doubt and cavil that can be urged against the facts of the New Testament. The development theories, or theory (for they all resolve themselves into one), may be true; but, if there be historical truth, the Christian miracles are also true, and they make the development, not the process of automatic nature, but the chosen method of the Almighty Providence, a method intrinsically no less worthy of the divine wisdom and love than the separate creation of each specific type.

Similar considerations apply to the divine element in the scriptures, Hebrew and Christian. Take, for instance, the Pentateuch, of late the target specially selected for the shafts of infidelity. The theology and ethics of these books, compared with the age and culture which gave them birth, are as truely a miracle as was, the resurrection of Lazarus. I care nothing about the question of authorship, though there are in behalf of their authorship, in great part at least, by Moses strong considerations which I have not yet seen invalidated. The books are their own evidence, not indeed that Moses wrote them, but that whoever wrote them had a wisdom, an insight, a foresight, of which the source does not exist in this world. This divine element in their authorship is a fact which must be taken in connection with the facts which so strongly agitate the world of science. The latter cannot negative the former. Still less can mere theories, even if they furnish the best possible exposition for the physical facts on which they are based, obliterate the superhuman characteristics of that primeval record. Let the lovers of the Bible wait without fear. It may be that these theories will join the long procession of hypotheses that have culminated and then fallen into oblivion. It may be that they will obtain, on just grounds, an enduring foot

hold in the realm of science; and if so, instead of making the Bible or any portion of it obsolete, they will only-as has already been the case with the established astronomical and geological truths which at the outset appalled timid believers-attach a profounder depth of meaning to the declaration, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," and a loftier rhythm to the glorious epic of the Mosaic cosmogony.

Leaving now the province of revealed religion, and meeting the theorists on their own ground, I would show you that these development theories, equally with that of specific creation, imply the divine personality.

Pantheism, even could it account for the development of the universe as it is, cannot account for the beginning to be. Self-executing laws must either be necessary and eternal, or else they must have been imposed upon the creation by a supreme Lawgiver. If there was no beginning of the universe, then the universe is eternal, and may be identical with God. But we know that there was a beginning. The shape of an oblate spheroid can have been given to the earth only by rotation on its axis in a semi-fluid state, and within measurable epochs there have been conditions of the earth's surface that imply a far less perfect consolidation than exists at the present moment, thus indicating a period when the process commenced, an era of creation. Even the silent stars, not in poetry, but in figures that cannot lie, "repeat the story of their birth"; for their movements are marked, not by the absolute uniformity which we should expect in an eternal system of nature, but by secular deflections and changes, which, though their periods are immense, yet necessarily point back to a beginning, and onward to a consummation of the present order of nature. The nebular theory, in its very terms, implies beginning, creation, literal creation out of nothing; for nebulous bodies actually existing now, if the telescope does not deceive us, exhibit the alleged world-forming process as still going on under our very eyes. But if matter be uncreated and existent in a

past eternity, if the developments from it take place by innate and inherent laws, and if there be no sovereign will, independent of material forms and laws, then in the depths of a past eternity all possible developments must have taken place, and there could now be nowhere in the universe tokens of infancy, of nonage, of creative processes not yet completed.

Moreover, it is admitted on all hands, as the result of observations that have been in progress from Newton's time to the present day, that planetary and stellar motion takes place, not in a vacuum, but in a resisting and retarding medium. If this be so, the planetary orbits are not strictly circular or elliptical, but spiral, with a diameter decreasing, in an infinitesimal ratio indeed, yet in a ratio that could not have been maintained through a past eternity without the absorption of the planets into the sun. Thus, while, on the one hand, geology is multiplying by myriads the formerly reputed centuries of the earth's duration, astronomy, on the other hand, bears equally conclusive testimony to the creation in time of the worlds that now are, and the commencement of the present laws and system of the universe.

Nay, geology equally refutes the hypothesis of an unbeginning, eternal succession of generations. Through ages whose compass our arithmetic cannot count or span, through successive stages of creation of which the earlier types have no counterpart among the present tribes of being, it carries us back to an era when no foot of beast trod the reeking earth, no fin ploughed the turbid chaos, no wing floated in the murky expanse swept by humid wind-torrents; when no plant had either soil for its root or sunlight to feed its growth; when, to employ terms which the Pentateuch might seem to have appropriated from the results of our latest and ripest science: "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep."

Yet unbeginning existence there must be; for though a past eternity baffles our power of conception, any other

hypothesis is simply absurd. "Had there e'er been nought, nought still had been." The starting of either matter or mind into uncaused being is a theory which refutes itself by its mere statement. But if there was a beginning of material being, then there must be an unbeginning Creator. And in that Parent Mind must have dwelt all life, all properties of beings, - the thoughts that were crystallized into worlds and suns and systems, the wealth of beauty that has gladdened unnumbered races and generations, the varied attributes whose inspiration has kindled the vital flame, lighted the lamp of reason, inbreathed the soul of love, and furnished all orders of existence, from the archangel to the worm, with powers and faculties appropriate to their life-work; for from the Creator can have proceeded nought that was not first in him, nought but the effluence of his spirit, the outgoing of his attributes.

I have spoken of the beginning of all things. Let us now consider the bearing of general laws on the question of the divine personality. These laws are, to a certain extent, admitted alike by the Pantheist and the Christian theist. Whether they are universal in their operation, or whether they reach only so far as human calculation or expectation can extend, is a question which in this world we probably shall never be able to answer. It is at least a possible theory, that what we call general laws are simply wonted methods of the divine administration within that region of proximate causes which is the sole sphere of human foresight and action,-methods designed to sustain in man that confidence in external nature without which there could be neither industry, enterprise, nor hope in human affairs; and that beyond this sphere the remoter orders of causes have no law but the discretionary Providence of him who is infinite in wisdom. This theory is indeed open to grave doubt; but it cannot be disproved, and to many believers in revelation it seems to be sustained by the infallible authority of holy writ.

But we will leave this debatable ground, and assume that

the ordinary course of nature is governed by general laws, without variableness or exception. These laws either are or are not uniform in all space and time. We cannot demonstrate their uniformity. In space, we cannot yet com prehend in our generalizations such phenomena as the different rates of velocity in the diurnal rotation of the planets, the varying interstellar distances, the single and binary stars, and many anomalous appearances in the field of telescopic vision. In time, there is among physicists a permanent controversy between the uniformitarians and the catastrophists, the former maintaining that the changes on the earth's surface are all to be attributed to the causes now in operation; the latter referring them to violent catas trophes, each marking the introduction of a new order of physical causes. If the laws of nature are not uniform in all space, and have not been uniform in all time, then supreme mind, sovereign will alone can have created the difference; for it is inconceivable that the automatic tendencies of nature can have obeyed different impulses at different periods, or in different portions of the universe.

Suppose, on the other hand, that the laws of nature are uniform. Law implies a lawgiver. The two ideas are inseparable. An orderly creation, formed and sustained spontaneously, is as absurd a conception as is the spontane ous building of a house or printing of a book. Correlation, harmony, development of form from form and life from life,

- the Darwinian theory, equally with the most orthodox hypothesis of the creation, -- implies mind, is inconceivable without mind. The tendency of an ungoverned universe must be to catastrophe and chaos, if indeed by any chance it could ever have emerged from chaos.

Especially does the latest phasis of physical philosophy render this tendency inevitable. We used to consider electricity, caloric, magnetism, and the like, as each a separate force with its own conditions and limits, and, consequently, each a check upon all the rest. We are now taught to recognize but one force in nature, and to regard light and