368 SLIMY JELLY DE PROFUNDIS. 



Strauss to complete his work to his own satisfaction. It is 

 only recently that he has been able to assure himself and 

 his readers that the living and the non-living are one. 

 Now he is at last convinced that the chasm between the 

 living and the non-living can be spanned " without the aid 

 of a miracle." Who, says he, having a " clear cosmical 

 conception in harmony with the present stand-point of 

 astronomy can represent to himself a Deity throned in 

 heaven ? " Has not the ancient personal God been " dis- 

 possessed of his habitation " by the revelations of physical 

 science ? There being no longer " a divine court, the 

 angels disappear likewise." But, argues Strauss, " if we no 

 longer possess a Christian heaven, we have instead an in- 

 numerable multitude of stars on which there is space and 

 to spare for more multitudinous hosts of departed spirits 

 than our earth is able to furnish," but then " our colonies 

 of souls, arriving there as emigrants from this world," 

 Strauss suggests, "would find the ground already oc- 

 cupied. " 



But this excessively sensitive conscientious and upright 

 critic, who cannot believe in God and who laughs at the 

 idea of heaven, sees no difficulty in accepting as a sort of 

 new revelation a "slimy heap of jelly" which was recently 

 for the first time dredged up de profundis. " As long as 

 the contrast between organic and inorganic, lifeless and 

 living nature, was understood as an absolute one," there 

 was, says Strauss, "no possibility of spanning the chasm 

 without the aid of a miracle." But an " apparition of life " 

 in its crudest form, "has since been actually demonstrated." 

 By Bathybius and the moneres, " the chasm may be said 

 to be bridged, and the transition effected from the in- 



