51 
country by the late Mr. Baden Powell, in his “Christianity 
without Judaism,” “The Order of Nature,” and his essay 
“ On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity,” in “ Essays 
and Reviews.” 
Admitting that the allowance of one miracle is as efficient 
a demolition of the axiom of the “ chain of endless causation ” 
as a thousand; that the creation of the universe, or the 
creation of man, or the creation of any living being must most 
undoubtedly be regarded as a miracle ; that where there is a 
commencement of the chain of causation, which creation must 
be, the chain cannot be endless he therefore strove with all 
his might to deny a creation. “ In Christianity without Ju- 
daism,” he tells us that the facts of geology compel us “unin- 
terruptedly to extend the domain of natural order through the 
infinity of past time/* “ That everything has gone on from 
one age to another, through the countless periods of past dura- 
tion to the depths of primeval time, in the same unbroken 
chain of regular changes ;” and, again, that the Biblical account 
of creation is a parable or fiction designedly untrue. These 
assertions with respect to creation he repeats again and again 
in his “ Order of Nature;” indeed, it is the dominant thought 
throughout most of the volume. In “Essays and Reviews,” 
he tells us, “ that the simple but grand truth of the law of con- 
servation, and the stability of the heavenly motions, now well 
understood by all sound cosmical philosophers, is but the type 
of the universal self-sustaining and self-evolving powers which 
pervade all nature ;” and when we ask whether living beings 
were created, or whether they have existed in an unbroken end- 
less chain of causation through the infinite ages of the past, 
he satisfies our curiosity by telling us that “ it is now acknow- 
ledged, under the high sanction of the name of Owen, that 
‘ creation 3 is only another name for our ignorance of the mode 
of production ; and it has been the unanswered and unanswer- 
able argument of another reasoner that new species must have 
originated either out of their inorganic elements, or out of pre- 
viously organized forms ; either development or spontaneous 
generation must be true ; while a work has now appeared by 
a naturalist of the most acknowledged authority, Mr. Darwin* s 
masterly volume on the Origin of Species by the law of 'natural 
selection/ which now substantiates on undeniable grounds 
the very principle so long denounced by the first naturalists, — ■ 
the origination of new species by natural causes ; a work which 
must soon bring about an entire revolution of opinion in favour 
of the self -evolving powers of nature . 33 
Instead, therefore, of creation, Mr. Baden Powell gives us 
the self-evolving powers of nature acting on uncreated matter. 
