VRlillTIVE MAN. 839 



faith. Even in respect to the" question of species, 

 in all the long chain between the Ascidian and the 

 man, he has not certainly established one link; and 

 in the very last change, that from the ape-like 

 ancestor, he equally fails to satisfy us as to matters 

 so trivial as the loss of the hair, which, on the 

 hypothesis, clothed the pre-human back, and on 

 matters so weighty as the dawn of human reason 

 and conscience. 



We thus see that evolution as an hypothesis has no 

 basis in experience or in scientific fact, and that its 

 imagined series of transmutations has breaks which 

 cannot be filled. We have now to consider how it 

 stands with the belief that man has been created by 

 a higher power. Against this supposition the evolu- 

 tionists try to create a prejudice in two ways. First, 

 they maintain with Herbert Spencer that the hypo- 

 thesis pf creation is inconceivable, or, as they say, 

 " unthinkable ;" an assertion which, when examined, 

 proves to mean only that we do not know perfectly 

 the details of such an operation, an objection equally 

 fatal to the origin either of matter or life, on the 

 hypothesis of evolution. Secondly, they always refer 

 to creation as if it must be a special miracle, in the 

 sense of a contravention of or departure from ordinary 

 natural laws ; but this is an assumption utterly without 

 proof, since creation may be as much according to law 

 as evolution, though in either case the precise laws 

 involved may be very imperfectly known. 



How absurd, they say, to imagine an animal created 



