and dew, instead of being arbitrarily and
instantly created. The conclusion reached depends on the spirit of
the observer. Newton could say, "This most beautiful system of the
sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and
dominion of an intelligent and powerful being!" Still it is well to
recognize that some of its most ardent defenders have advocated it
as materialistic. And Laplace said of it to Napoleon, "I have no
need of the hypothesis of a god."

The materialistic statement of the theory is this: that matter
is at first assumed to exist as an infinite cloud of fire-mist,
dowered with power latent therein to grow of itself into every
possibility of world, flower, animal, man, mind, and affection,
without any interference or help from without. But it requires
far more of the Divine Worker than any other theory. He must fill
matter with capabilities to take care of itself, and this would
tax the abilities of the Infinite One far more than a constant
supervision and occasional interference. Instead of making the
vase in perfect form, and coloring it with exquisite beauty by
an ever-present skill, he must endow the clay with power to make
itself in perfect form, adorn itself with delicate beauty, and
create other vases.

The nebular hypothesis is briefly this: All the matter composing
all the bodies of the sun, planets, and satellites once existed
in an exceedingly diffused state; [Page 183] rarer than any gas with
which we are acquainted, filling a space larger than the orbit of
Neptune. Gravitation gradually contracted this matter into a
condensing globe of immense extent. Some parts would naturally be
denser than others, and in the course of contraction a rotary
motion, it is affirmed, would be engendered. Rotation would flatten
the globe somewhat in the line of its axis. Contracting still more,
the rarer gases, aided by centrifugal force, would be left behind as
a ring that would ultimately be separated, like Saturn's ring, from
the retreating body. There would naturally be some places in this
ring denser than others; these would gradually absorb all the ring
into a planet, and still revolve about the central mass, and still
rotate on its own axis, throwing off rings from itself. Thus the
planet Neptune would be left behind in the first sun-ring, to make
its one moon; the planet Uranus left in the next sun-ring, to make
its four moons from four successive planet-rings; Saturn, with its
eight