l, there
was very strong names applied to her in Scripture.

What was good for the Pope was good for your minister, too, my dear
madam,--said the Master. Good for everybody that is afraid of what
people call "science." If it should prove that dead things come to life
of themselves, it would be awkward, you know, because then somebody will
get up and say if one dead thing made itself alive another might, and
so perhaps the earth peopled itself without any help. Possibly the
difficulty wouldn't be so great as many people suppose. We might perhaps
find room for a Creator after all, as we do now, though we see a little
brown seed grow till it sucks up the juices of half an acre of ground,
apparently all by its own inherent power. That does not stagger us; I am
not sure that it would if Mr. Crosses or Mr. Weekes's acarus should
show himself all of a sudden, as they said he did, in certain mineral
mixtures acted on by electricity.

The Landlady was off soundings, and looking vacant enough by this time.

The Master turned to me.--Don't think too much of the result of our
one experiment. It means something, because it confirms those other
experiments of which it was a copy; but we must remember that a hundred
negatives don't settle such a question. Life does get into the world
somehow. You don't suppose Adam had the cutaneous unpleasantness
politely called psora, do you?

--Hardly,--I answered.--He must have been a walking hospital if he
carried all the maladies about him which have plagued his descendants.

--Well, then, how did the little beast which is peculiar to that special
complaint intrude himself into the Order of Things? You don't suppose
there was a special act of creation for the express purpose of bestowing
that little wretch on humanity, do you?

I thought, on the whole, I would n't answer that question.

--You and I are at work on the same problem, said the Young Astronomer
to the Master.--I have looked into a microscope now and then, and I
have seen that perpetual dancing about of minute atoms in a fluid, which
you call molecular motion. Just so, when I look through my telescope I
see the star-dust whirling about in the infinite expanse of ether; or
if I do not see its motion, I know that it is only on account of its
immeasurable distance. Matter and motion everywhere; void and rest
nowhere. You ask why your restless microscopic atoms may not come
together and become self-conscious and self-moving organis