328 THE FUTUKE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



laws of organized matter can accomplish all the rest. 

 But what if chemical combination, aided and supple- 

 mented by natural selection, having infinite ages to 

 make many chance trials and failures, and working 

 under more favourable atmospheric or oceanic conditions, 

 on the cooling surface of the globe, or better still, in the 

 dark ocean beds, what if, between them, they should 

 have hit at last by accident upon some faint rude 

 attempts at life, some rudimentary structureless forms, 

 possibly like the monera as now exhibited ; which, 

 having been once successfully launched into life, and 

 well under way, afterwards, by the continuing favour of 

 fortune and natural selection, grew and prospered, and 

 were developed into much greater things ? What, in a 

 word, if chemical affinity and natural selection, that is 

 to say, matter and its necessary laws, and neither on the 

 one hand Chaos, nor on the other a personal world- 

 fashioning Creator, were the original father of things ? 



And as for this rival hypothesis, this supposed super- 

 natural process of creation, reflect for a moment, and see 

 if it be not a mere word expressly invented to cover our 

 ignorance an empty name, which men pass off on them- 

 selves for a real explanation. For, only think, what 

 could this impossible process of creation from blank non- 

 entity be this sudden miraculous summons and pre- 

 cipitation of a host of suns and planets from the empty 

 void, made from no pre-existent materials ? If your 

 mind can really " think the great thought of creation." 

 in this fashion so different from either the Hegelian or 

 the Darwinian conception of it then indeed the process 

 of miraculous creation might be possible in the cosmos, 

 since your mind at least has accomplished the marvellous 

 process of creation, has constructed its thought out of 

 no existent or conceivable materials ! And the sudden 



