396 r^ATURE AND MAN. 



his own exposition of it, of any but that purely scientific concep- 

 tion of orderly sequence, under the constant and uniform action 

 of physical forces, in which there is assuredly nothing anti-theistic. 

 Let it not be forgotten that Newton, the devoutest man of science 

 that ever lived, was reproached by the theologians of his time for 

 setting up forces of his own invention as a substitute for the power 

 of God ; a charge of which every one now sees the absurdity. 

 And yet Laplace merely extended the Newtonian doctrines of 

 force and motion into the past, by showing how, under their con- 

 tinuous operation, a diffused nebulosity would evolve itself into 

 a solar system. Whence came the mutual attraction of its par- 

 ticles, which aggregated them into masses, and gave these masses 

 their movements of rotation, it was not for him — any more than 

 for Newton — to explain. To Laplace it must have been apparent 

 as it is to us, that the whole of this process of evolution implies 

 a commencement, — that however far back we go in time, we come' 

 to a point at which the mutual attractions must have begun to 

 exert themselves, — and that as a universal hxat perfectly homogeneous 

 " fire-mist " (the only condition under which it could have existed 

 from eternity) could not of itself have broken up into separate 

 parts, some account has to be given of its heterogeneousness, the 

 existence of which has to be assumed as the starting-point of the 

 process. Hence it is obvious that, however remote that point to 

 which we trace in thought the history of our universe, we are still 

 confronted with the impossibility of accounting by physical causa- 

 tion for its commencement ; and further, that if we find our only 

 explanation of this commencement in moral causality, we do not 

 exclude the subsequent perpetual agency of Creative Will, because 

 in scientific reasoning we speak of it in the language of physical 

 force. To the clear-seeing theologian, the evolution of an orderly 

 Kosmos, not by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, but by the 

 continuous operation of mutual attractions according to a law 

 of sublime simplicity, should furnish (as it seems to rne) the 

 sublimest exemplification of an Infinite Intelligence, working 

 out its vast designs " without variableness or the shadow of 

 turning." 



But, it may be objected, the nebular hypothesis of Herschel 

 and Laplace has been disproved by subsequent research. One 



