ON THE CREATION AND GOD. 21 



miracle the sudden production of things by a Super- 

 natural Personal Creator from blank nonentity the pro- 

 duction of effects without prior natural causes or con- 

 ditions,, and by a process respecting which neither science 

 nor human thought can form any conception. The 

 miracle, from which spontaneous generation would de- 

 liver us, and which puts reason to confusion, once again 

 returns, after being everywhere expelled from the wide 

 territory of Science. 



4. Without further comment for the present on the 

 hypothesis of spontaneous generation, let us resume the 

 story of creation, which, it should be observed, from 

 the production of the first planet from the nebular vapour, 

 to the production of the first human being from a 

 lower form of life, covers much more than the six days' 

 paroxysmal creative labour as recorded in Genesis, neces- 

 sitating, as it did, many hundreds, perhaps thousands of 

 millions of years for its slow evolutionary achievement. 



We have learned the origin of the worlds of space, 

 according to Kant, Laplace, and the physicists ; of the 

 world of life in the dim ocean-deeps, according to Oken, 

 Haeckel, and the naturalists; there remains to be told 

 by Science the origin of the multitudinous and varied 

 species of animals and plants, even should we admit that 

 Nature, the all-bountiful mother, herself unwittingly 

 accomplished the first grand preliminary feats in the 

 spontaneous production of the rudest and simplest forms 

 of life. From the rude and simple to the refined and 

 complex ; from the homogeneous moneron to the hetero- 

 geneous mammal ; from the " few primordial forms " of 

 life which Darwin begins with, and which, let us suppose, 

 have resulted from the due collocation of the chemical 

 atoms after many abortive tentatives, up to the endlessly 

 varied and highly elaborated forms of life which science 



