AND ITS CONSEQUENCES. 15 



Nor does the purely Christian objection to the development 

 hypothesis seem less, but even more, insuperable than that 

 derived from the province of natural theology. The belief 

 which is perhaps of all others most fundamentally essential 

 to the revealed scheme of salvation, is the belief that " God 

 created man upright," and that man, instead of proceeding 

 onward and upward from this high and fair beginning, to a 

 yet higher and fairer standing in the scale of creation, sank, 

 and became morally lost and degraded. And hence the ne- 

 cessity for that second dispensation of recovery and restora- 

 tion which forms the entire burden of God's revealed mes- 

 sage to man. If, according to the development theory, the 

 progress of the " first Adam" was an upward progress, the 

 existence of the " second Adam," — that *' happier man," ac- 

 cording to Milton, whose special work it is to " restore" and 

 " regain the blissful seat" of the lapsed race, — is simply a 

 meaningless anomaly. Christianity, if the development theo ry 

 be true, is exactly what some of the more extreme Moderate 

 divines of the last age used to make it, — an idle and un- 

 sightly excrescence on a code of morals that would be perfect 

 were it away. 



Job solaced himself with the assurance that, even after worms had de- 

 stroyed his body, he was in the flesh to see God. Had Professor Oken 

 been one of his comforters, he would have sought to restrict his hopes to 

 the prospect of living in the worms. " If the organic fundamental sub- 

 stance consist of infusoria," says the Professor, " so must the whole orga- 

 nic world originate from infusoria. Plants and animals can only be me- 

 tamorphoses of infusoria. This being granted, so also must aU organiza- 

 tions consist of infusoria, and, during their destruction, dissolve into the 

 same. Every plant, every animal, is converted by maceration into a 

 mucous mass ; this putrefies, and the moisture is stocked with infusoria. 

 Putrefaction is nothing else than a division of organisms into infusoria, 



— a reduction of the higher to the primary life Death is 



no annihilation, but only a change. One individual emerges out of an- 

 other. Death is only a transition to another life, — not into death. This 

 transition from one life to another takes place through the primary con- 

 dition of the organic, or the mucus." — Physio- Philosophy, pp. 187-189. 



