REVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF LIFE. 267 



reference to the introduction of life, with reference to the soul 

 of man, with reference to the heavenly gifts of genius and 

 prophecy, with reference to the introduction of the Saviour 

 Himself into the world, and with reference to the spiritual gifts 

 and graces of God's people, all these spring not from sporadic 

 acts of intervention, but from the continuous action of God 

 and the unseen world ; and this, we must never forget, is the true 

 ideal of creation in Scripture and in sound theology. Only in 

 such exceptional and little influential philosophies as that ot 

 Democritus, and in the speculations of a few men carried off 

 their balance by the brilliant physical discoveries of our age, 

 has this necessarily partial and imperfect view been adopted. 

 Never indeed was its imperfection more clear than in the light 

 of modern science. 



Geology, by tracing back all present things to their origin^ 

 was the first science to establish on a basis of observed facts 

 the necessity of a beginning and end of the world. But even 

 physical science now teaches us that the visible universe is a 

 vast machine for the dissipation of energy ; that the processes 

 going on in it must have had a beginning in time, and that all 

 things tend to a final and helpless equilibrium. This necessity 

 implies an unseen power, an invisible universe, in which the 

 visible universe must have originated, and to which its energ" 

 is ever returning. The hiatus between the seen and the unseen 

 may be bridged over by the conceptions of atomic vortices of 

 force, and by the universal and continuous ether ; but whether 

 or not, it has became clear that the conception of the unseen 

 as existing has become necessary to our belief in the possible 

 existence of the physical universe itself, even without taking 

 life into the account. 



It is in the domain of life, however, that this necessity be- 

 comes most apparent; and it is in the plant that we first 

 clearly perceive a visible testimony to that unseen which is the 

 counterpart of the seen. Life in the plant opposes the outward 

 rush of force in our system, arrests a part of it on its way, fixes 



