for the general reader. His varied services have been
acknowledged by numerous distinctions, including the highest honour a
British man of science can obtain--the Presidency of the Royal Society
of London, to which he was elected at the end of last year.

Sir William Thomson has been all his life a firm believer in the truth
of Christianity, and his great scientific attainments add weight to the
following words, spoken by him when in the chair at the annual meeting
of the Christian Evidence Society, May 23, 1889:--'I have long felt that
there was a general impression in the non-scientific world, that the
scientific world believes Science has discovered ways of explaining all
the facts of Nature without adopting any definite belief in a Creator. I
have never doubted that that impression was utterly groundless. It seems
to me that when a scientific man says--as it has been said from time to
time--that there is no God, he does not express his own ideas clearly.
He is, perhaps, struggling with difficulties; but when he says he does
not believe in a creative power, I am convinced he does not faithfully
express what is in his own mind, He does not fully express his own
ideas. He is out of his depth.

'We are all out of our depth when we approach the subject of life. The
scientific man, in looking at a piece of dead matter, thinking over the
results of certain combinations which he can impose upon it, is himself
a living miracle, proving that there is something beyond that mass of
dead matter of which he is thinking. His very thought is in itself a
contradiction to the idea that there is nothing in existence but dead
matter. Science can do little positively towards the objects of this
society. But it can do something, and that something is vital and
fundamental. It is to show that what we see in the world of dead matter
and of life around us is not a result of the fortuitous concourse of
atoms.

'I may refer to that old, but never uninteresting subject of the
miracles of geology. Physical science does something for us here. St.
Peter speaks of scoffers who said that "all things continue as they were
from the beginning of the creation;" but the apostle affirms himself
that "all these things shall be dissolved." It seems to me that even
physical science absolutely demonstrates the scientific truth of these
words. We feel that there is no possibility of things going on for ever
as they have done for the last six thousand years.