of organic being seem more pregnant with important
consequences to the science of the natural theologian than the fact of
the peculiar order in which they begin to be.

The importance of the now demonstrated fact, that all the living
organisms which exist on earth had a beginning, and that a time was when
they were not, will be best appreciated by those who know how much, and,
it must be added, how unsuccessfully, writers on the evidences have
labored to convict of an absurdity, on this special head, the atheistic
assertors of an infinite series of beings. Even Robert Hall (in his
famous Sermon on Modern Infidelity) could but play, when he attempted
grappling with the subject, upon the words _time_ and _eternity_, and
strangely argue, that as each member of an infinite series must have
begun in _time_, while the succession itself was _eternal_, it was
palpably absurd to ask us to believe in a _succession_ of beings that
was thus infinitely earlier than any of the beings themselves which
composed the succession. And Bentley, more perversely ingenious still,
could assert, that as each of the individuals in an infinite series must
have consisted of many parts,--that as each man in such a series, for
instance, must have had ten fingers and ten toes,--it was palpably
absurd to ask us to believe in an infinity which thus comprised many
infinities,--ten infinities of fingers, for example, and ten infinities
of toes. The infidels had the better in this part of the argument. It
was surely easy enough to show against the great preacher, on the one
hand, that _time_ in such a question is but a mere word that means
simply a certain limited or definite period which had a beginning,
whereas eternity means an unlimited and undefinable period which had no
beginning;--that his seeming argument was no argument, but merely a sort
of verbal play on this difference of signification in the
words;--further, that man could conceive of an infinite series, whether
extended in infinite space, or subsisting in infinite time, just as well
as he could conceive of any other infinity, and in the same way; and
that the only mode of disproving the possibility of such a series would
be to show, what of course cannot be shown, that in conceiving of it in
the progressive mode in which, according to Locke, man can alone
conceive of the infinite or the eternal, there would be a point reached
at which it would be impossible for him to go on adding millions on