FAITH WITH ITS MIR A CLE. 3 8 1 



thorough-going evolutionists would unquestionably deny 

 both God and creative power as regards life of every grade. 



Although it seems scarcely possible to care for, or take 

 much interest in, far less to worship, any sort of supposed 

 creative power, that ceased to act ere a cilium waved, and 

 ages and ages before the simplest living forms and growing 

 structures appeared upon our earth, it is true that the mind 

 may experience a sensation of awe, when it contemplates 

 the results supposed ex hypothesi, to be the consequences of 

 that one stupendous miracle and the self-annihilation or self- 

 extinction which is supposed to "have instantly followed upon 

 the promulgation of the tremendous and far-reaching fiat. 

 Man, as it seems to me, could not look up to such evan- 

 escent long-annihilated omnipotence with much veneration, 

 and the acknowledgment upon man's part of a deity that 

 ceased to be, infinite ages before man was, cannot, one 

 would think, be a matter of much consequence to him or to 

 present life. But at the same time, miserable as the idea of 

 a reasoning being looking up to a self-extinguished God 

 must be confessed to be, it is less disheartening, less reck- 

 less, less utterly hopeless than the desolation of nullipotence 

 while the Cosmos ever blindly, uselessly acting ever 

 working for no purpose, with inexorable natural laws neither 

 kind nor cruel, imposed no one knows how, when, why, or by 

 whom is not likely to commend itself to a being possessing 

 will, and knowledge, and at least power to be or not to be. 

 But Strauss says, " faith with its miracle shall perish." 

 No more shall we say, God said, " Let the earth bring forth 

 grass, and the herb yielding seed ; let her bring forth the 

 living creature after his kind," but rather " matter and 



