74 



lish the high probability of Mr. Darwin's hypothesis, I shall glance 

 at it first. 



Atheism and spontaneous generation stand in the same cate- 

 gory of self-evident absurdities. No existence, no force, can create 

 itself. To suppose this possible, we must assume that such ex- 

 istence, such force, must act before it exists — a manifest absurdity. 

 It follows, therefore, that some being, some force, must have eternally 

 existed. It follows, also, that such being, such force, must have had 

 the power to produce all that ever has been, all that is, and all 

 that ever shall be, world without end. That Being is God. Mr. 

 Darwin believes in God ; nothing that he has ever taught touches 

 the question of the divine existence. Admitting that existence, it 

 follows that this is God's world ; that every force, every agency, 

 every process, that may influence or modify its living inhabitants, 

 is included in the divine government. It follows, also, that each indi- 

 vidual amongst us is as truly created by God as was the first living 

 man. The expression " God breathed into his nostrils the breath 

 of life, and man became a living soul," may be said as truly of the 

 infant born into the world at the present hour, as of that far distant 

 event when the virgin forests first echoed the sound of a human 

 voice. 



Here we have common ground. The believer and the dis- 

 believer in the doctrine of evolution are agreed that God is the 

 creator of all living beings. The question then simply resolves 

 itself into the manner of that creation. The believer in evolution 

 thinks that there are indications to be gathered from the great book 

 of nature, from the history of the globe, from a careful comparison 

 of the organic beings that people it now, and that have suc- 

 cessively peopled it in long past ages, to give us a faint idea of 

 that manner. The unbeliever says there are none. The believer 

 thinks he can detect in the way God deals with His creatures now, 

 the great laws that have acted all through the past in modifying 

 and building up the living forms we see around us, ourselves in- 

 cluded ; and he thinks, also, that these great laws, or rather those 

 modes of operation, are sufficient to account for all. God's method 

 being the same all through the past, the same now to-day and 



