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question has not yet been fully and impartially discussed. (Hear, hear.) 
Those who differ from dogmas which declare that everything depends on 
the properties of particles, and that every change is due to physical laws, 
have not been able to get themselves fairly heard. The points they have 
to urge have never yet been fairly considered ; and the remark applies even 
to the simplest points in connexion with this great and important subject. 
There can be no doubt that the issue is a portentous one. The imagination is 
not able to conceive a greater issue than arises out of the difference of view 
between those who believe that an Infinite Power lives, and interferes and has 
interfered for special purposes, and those who hold that all the phenomena 
of nature are due to the inherent properties of lifeless matter and to 
antecedent phenomena. (Hear, hear.) These two conclusions are incom- 
patible ; and however we may shuffle, and say there is much to be said 
on both sides, one thing seems perfectly certain, and that is, that if the 
physical views put forward, not by one or two persons, nor by ten or 
twenty, but by hundreds, are true — if they do not imply denial of the 
existence of a creative Deity, they unquestionably imply the denial of the 
existence of a living Deity, and of a Deity men could love, honour, or 
worship. (Hear, hear.) Of this I feel assured, that if these physical laws 
have led to the formation of living matter — of all the living things on the 
face of the earth — there can be no reason for accepting the conclusion that 
there is a living God ; and upon this idea the acceptance of religion 
depends. If, therefore, the scientific views put forward at the present day, 
and received with implicit faith by large numbers of people, are true, we 
must modify our ideas extremely ; and I, for one, fail to see on what 
grounds religion is then to rest. In this view I do not stand alone ; but, at 
the same time, I admit there are persons for' whose opinions I entertain 
respect who differ from me. When we endeavour to work the question 
out, by going back, as far as we are able to do, to the origin of things, we 
arrive at two incompatible conclusions, which cannot both be true. We 
are unable to accept both, but it seems to me we are, from the very nature 
of our mind, forced to accept one or the other ; and, this being so, I need 
scarcely say that the acceptance of one of these conclusions must be unsatis- 
factory in the extreme, because it is contradicted by the workings of a 
man’s own mind, as everybody who allows his understanding to have the 
question and arguments fairly presented to it, must feel. I must apologise 
for having attempted to go into this great subject, because it is so vast 
that it would be impossible adequately to deal with it in the limits of a dis- 
cussion such as this. I have only endeavoured to say just a few words about 
what seems to me will be the real point at issue in time to come, namely — 
as to whether science has proved, or is likely to prove, a gradual transition 
from the non-living to the living, and that the non-living and living are 
one. I hold that nothing at all has as yet been done to show that there 
is the faintest reason for the belief that the living results from the non- 
living, in consequence of the action of physical laws. We can readily 
imagine the existence of the non-living, for ever and ever, without anything 
