ed. I, this marvellously complicated being,
torn by desires and despairs, was the result of the union of two
microscopic cells. "All living things come from the egg," such had been
Harvey's dictum. The result was like the tonic of a cold douche. I began
to feel cleansed and purified, as though something sticky-sweet which
all my life had clung to me had been washed away. Yet a question arose,
an insistent question that forever presses itself on the mind of man;
how could these apparently chemical and mechanical processes, which the
author of the book contented himself with recording, account for me? The
spermia darts for the egg, and pierces it; personal history begins. But
what mysterious shaping force is it that repeats in the individual the
history of the race, supervises the orderly division of the cells, by
degrees directs the symmetry, sets aside the skeleton and digestive
tract and supervises the structure?

I took up the second book, that on the philosophy of the organism, to
read in its preface that a much-to-be-honoured British nobleman
had established a foundation of lectures in a Scotch University for
forwarding the study of a Natural Theology. The term possessed me.
Unlike the old theology woven of myths and a fanciful philosophy of
the decadent period of Greece, natural theology was founded on science
itself, and scientists were among those who sought to develop it. Here
was a synthesis that made a powerful appeal, one of the many signs and
portents of a new era of which I was dimly becoming cognizant; and now
that I looked for signs, I found them everywhere, in my young Doctor, in
Krebs, in references in the texts; indications of a new order
beginning to make itself felt in a muddled, chaotic human world, which
might--which must have a parallel with the order that revealed itself in
the egg! Might not both, physical and social, be due to the influence of
the same invisible, experimenting, creating Hand?

My thoughts lingered lovingly on this theology so well named "natural,"
on its conscientiousness, its refusal to affirm what it did not prove,
on its lack of dogmatic dictums and infallible revelations; yet it gave
me the vision of a new sanction whereby man might order his life, a
sanction from which was eliminated fear and superstition and romantic
hope, a sanction whose doctrines--unlike those of the sentimental
theology--did not fly in the face of human instincts and needs. Nor was
it a theology devo