REVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF LIFE. 269 



In the light of all these considerations, whether bearing on 

 our knowledge or our ignorance, a higher and deeper question 

 presents itself, namely, that as to the relation of nature and of 

 man to a Personal Creator. To this it seems to me that the study 

 of the succession of life yields no uncertain reply. Call the pro- 

 gress of life an evolution if you will ; trace it back to primaeval 

 Protozoa, or to u congeries of atoms : still the truth remains that 

 nothing can be evolved out of these primitive materials except 

 what they originally contained. Now we find in the existence 

 of man, and in the tendency of the scheme of nature towards 

 his introduction, evidence that at least all that is involved in 

 the reasoning and moral nature of man must have existed 

 potentially before atoms began to shape themselves into crystals 

 or into organic forms. Nay, more than this is implied, for we 

 do not know that man and what he has hitherto been and 

 done constitute the ultimate perfection of nature, and we must 

 suspect that something much more than what we see in man 

 must be required for the origination of the chain of life. 

 What does this prove, in any sense in which human reason 

 can understand it ? Nothing less, it seems to me, than that 

 doctrine of the Almighty Divine Logos, or Creative Reason, as 

 the cause of all things, asserted in our sacred Scriptures, and 

 held in one form or another by all the greatest thinkers who 

 have attempted to deal with the question of origins. Falling 

 back on this great truth, whether presented to us in the simple 

 ** God said " of Genesis, or in the more definite form of the 

 New Testament, '* The Word was with God, and the Word was 

 God," we find ourselves in the presence of a Divine plan per- 

 vading all the ages of the earth's history and culminating in 

 man, who presents for the first time the image and likeness of 

 the Divine Maker ; and this forms the true nexus of all the 

 separate chains of life. Had man never existed, such reason- 

 ing might have been speculative merely, but the existence of 

 man, taken in connection with the progress of the plan which 

 has terminated in his advent, proves the existence of God. 



