TENDENCY OF NEW DOCTRINES. 369 



organic to the organic." Thus has faith been destroyed. 

 Thus has miracle at last been annihilated ! 



It is difficult to judge precisely to what extent the 

 general doctrines of life and the origin and formation of 

 living beings accepted by many must affect and modify 

 their idea of supernatural power, their belief in Christianity, 

 and what they were taught in early life to believe concern- 

 ing the attributes of God. There can however be no 

 doubt concerning the general tendency of the new doctrines 

 held upon these very important matters, no doubt as to 

 the general conclusions which must follow their acceptance. 

 And Strauss unquestionably deserves the thanks of honest 

 and upright persons of all opinions for having so clearly ex-: 

 pressed the conclusions which he considers must follow the 

 reception of the premisses. We are to abandon our idea of 

 a beginning. We are no longer to think of a Creator 

 breathing into matter the " breath of life." And even the 

 very modern notion of Omnipotence endowing matter with 

 forces and enacting laws by which the gradual evolution of 

 beings has resulted, without direct intervention and guidance, 

 must be given up, for that would be a form of miracle, and 

 miracle even in the first beginning has been exterminated 

 and rendered impossible, in thought, by the new cosmical 

 conception. Christian theology, the providential govern- 

 ment of God, will, design, intelligence in creation creation 

 itself, as a supernatural interference are to be set aside, or 

 absorbed into the cosmic conception, and so to disappear. 



This new and most comprehensive All, or Cosmos, we 

 are told is, " the sum total of infinite worlds in all stages of 

 growth and decay." It is not to be understood by itself. 

 The Cosmos is eternally unchanged as regards "the con- 



2 B 



