106 
Without doubt, had God left us wzthout a hint upon 
this interesting subject; had there been 20 message, or 
that message never been coufirmed, as the Mosaic record 
is in principle confirmed, by quotation by Christ, The 
Word, by whom all things are, and were created; by S. 
Paul, who assigns #0 “every seed his own body :” it were 
quite as easy to believe in our common descent from 
protoplasm, through countless Afons, as to believe what we 
know true by experience that ourselves are developed in 
a few short months from what is similar to protoplasm. 
But weneed not study Embryology to see the grandest 
development exercised in the drzefest space of time. We 
need look no further than the Peacock, auznually moulting, 
and rapidly reproducing his matchless train of tail coverts ; 
if we ask how is it done; the only intelligible answer is 
by the power of God ; it iso more of the bird, than the 
music ts of the Nightingale. 
Is it more difficult to believe in that beautiful bird’s 
special creation: or to believe that some inferior form, by 
a succession of vigorous, and yet more healthily vigorous 
offspring ; which, by that vigour, swrvived fittest in the 
struggle for existence ; which, by constant display before 
the hen bird, and by her selection of the more brilliant 
of her courtiers, did, through a cycle of time, gradually 
produce the splendid train; and achieve the glorious 
neck plumage of the present so beautiful bird. 
For all that Kingsley in his ‘‘ Water Babies” repre- 
sents Dame Nature as letting her creatures make them- 
selves; (Bacon’s “Second Causes”) this process of develop- 
ment (of which the energic guidance must still be admit- 
tedly Divine, and indeed is ungrudgingly allowed so to be 
by some that have followed Darwin); is more difficult 
to credit than the doctrine of special creations as revealed 
in the Word. 
ee es 
ae 
