appear to escape punishment, but it must be
remembered there are punishments from within which do not meet the eye.
If these fall on a man, he is sufficiently punished; if they do not fall
on him, it is probable we have been over hasty in assuming that he is
wicked.

CHAPTER IX. GOD THE UNKNOWN

The reader will already have felt that the panzoistic conception of
God-the conception, that is to say, of God as comprising all living
units in His own single person-does not help us to understand the origin
of matter, nor yet that of the primordial cell which has grown and
unfolded itself into the present life of the world. How was the world
rendered fit for the habitation of the first germ of Life? How came it
to have air and water, without which nothing that we know of as living
can exist? Was the world fashioned and furnished with aqueous and
atmospheric adjuncts with a view to the requirements of the infant
monad, and to his due development? If so, we have evidence of design,
and if so of a designer, and if so there must be Some far vaster Person
who looms out behind our God, and who stands in the same relation to him
as he to us. And behind this vaster and more unknown God there may be
yet another, and another, and another.

It is certain that Life did not make the world with a view to its own
future requirements. For the world was at one time red hot, and there
can have been no living being upon it. Nor is it conceivable that matter
in which there was no life-inasmuch as it was infinitely hotter than the
hottest infusion which any living germ can support-could gradually come
to be alive without impregnation from a living parent. All living things
that we know of have come from other living things with bodies and
souls, whose existence can be satisfactorily established in spite of
their being often too small for our detection. Since, then, the world
was once without life, and since no analogy points in the direction of
thinking that life can spring up spontaneously, we are driven to suppose
that it was introduced into this world from some other source extraneous
to it altogether, and if so we find ourselves irresistibly drawn to
the inquiry whether the source of the life that is in the world-the
impregnator of this earth-may not also have prepared the earth for the
reception of his offspring, as a hen makes an egg-shell or a peach a
stone for the protection of the germ within it? Not only are we drawn to
the inqui