1872.] 369 
remarkable indication of ‘the Life of the Blood,’ than is afforded by its 
extraordinary power of self-recovery, after having undergone the excessive 
perversion which is consequent upon the introduction of the more potent 
zymotic poisons; and every philosophical physician is ready to admit 
that, in this ots medicatrixy nature, rather than any remedial agency’ 
which it is in his power to apply, he must look for the restoration of 
his patient.” (Ib. Sec. 282.) It is the Life that is thus potent to carry 
on her work ; to repel injury, and to cure. 
Let any one look back upon the origin of life and its perpetuation, and 
he must say, in the retrospect, ‘‘Between me and the first man of my 
race the thread of life has never been broken. I am more than link of a 
chain; I am part of that first life, never yet severed. As his was from 
God, so is mine that of an ancestry of one continuous life.’? At the 
inception of each generation that has preceded each of us through many 
thousands of years, life was but an inherited speck ; but that speck was 
part of the next preceding life—commissioned to seize upon matter for 
its growth, in manner to fulfill the design of the Creator of the first life, 
and no other—and bound to arrest its own growth when that design 
should be filled out ; but yet continue the nurture of the normal being 
until its strength should be spent by its assigned lapse of years, or sooner 
termination by disease, or casualty. If it has left offspring, the continuous 
line of life may never be broken,—as certainly it will not have been as 
to any survivors of the race, whoever they may be; for between them and 
the first parent, at any future age, their genealogy, their life, will never 
have been severed. But the elements of matter that have composed the 
bodies of the countless ancestry will have been dissipated ten thousand 
times, and gone the many repeated rounds of life and death; yet one 
continuous line of life has connected all the generations by a continuity 
more complete than a chain of many severed but interlocked links—by an 
actual physical and vital portion transmitted from every parent to every 
child; being as truly one continuous life, as that the planted willow slip 
continues the life of the parent tree. " 
Let not, then, the materialist persuade us that matter has done all this 
by matter’s inherent power. The ceaseless life has done it, compelling 
inert matter to obey it; and thus will it use matter to carry on all the 
life of earth, while the world shall last. The dead matter so used could 
of itself exert no such power; could not initiate life ; could exercise no 
cunning of construction; but only life can continue, carry on, and per- 
petuate life ; so transmute dead matter to living, and make it part of that 
life, whose stream in humanity commenced with the first created man, 
and will only end with the last. All this is sure induction from bound- 
lessly observed facts ; and reverses the theory of the materialist. And all 
that life has done so wonderfully and so intelligently, it has done and 
ever does without a conscious will of its own. It must, therefore, do it 
by a will and Power that is above it, and that rules the life ; the Power 
that gives and rules the instinct of the animal; the Power that gives the 
A. P. S,—VOL,. X17.—2U 
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