IN EVOLUTION FROM A GHOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW, 179 
remarks in our last paragraph, and need not here be con- 
sidered further. If on the other hand it results from 
inanimate circumstance it must be accounted for through 
the forces of inanimate nature. It really is part of the 
question involved in the nature and history of the earth and 
sun and air. Whether the natural forces inherent in these 
are sufficient to explain much of the advance which the 
theory of extreme evolution requires, we need not now 
discuss. So far their outside influence may be allowed for the 
sake of argument ; but we are thereby simply carried back to 
the greater question, “ What brought about inanimate nature 
itself?” It contains in itself no reason for its own history, 
no explanation of its own origin. If it be sufficient to 
account for sun and air and earth, for chemical elements 
and physical agencies, by adopting Topsy’s science and 
saying “they growed,” the question may be left unsolved. 
But if inanimate effects, no less than animate, must have a 
cause, if it is unimaginable that the existing Universe arose 
without an Author, then too these outside correspondences 
are only the methods of His work, they are the channels, not 
the causes, of the incentives to evolution, which thus must 
find their only starting-point from Him, 
(4) EHetreme evolution, acting through any measur able time, is 
inadequate to explain the production of the present state of 
animated nature from primordial protoplasm, except under the 
definite outside control of a Power, acting incessantly to direct 
and hasten its action, se that such results should be produced.— 
For the doctrine of chances, applied to the unaided advance 
from protoplasm by evolution, at once shows how impr obable 
it is, that, even in an illimitable time, the present “cosmos,’ 
with its intricate variety elaborately in order, could be 
achieved by it alone; and the acknowledged time-limit 
turns this improbability into a mathematical impossibility. 
Such difficulties to the working of extreme evolution, as we 
have already reviewed, would, if it were supposed unaided, 
become at once insuperable. In face of these drawbacks no 
possibility of such a result to its action would be conceivable at 
a unless an outside Power turned its weakness into strength. 
. Butif these things are so, we arrive at this; that Nature, 
in its origin, progress, and present state, is the e workmanship 
of an outside originating and controlling Power; and there- 
fore we may, and have a aright to, use for it the word “Crea- 
tion”; and extreme evolution, if it could be asserted as an 
established fact, would be the strongest argument for 'Theism. 
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