acts for which it can never hope to account. But it
_may_ begin by assuming that, speaking roughly, the universe was always
very much what we see it now, and that composition and decomposition
have always nearly balanced each other, and that there have been from
the beginning the same sun and moon and planets and stars in the sky,
the same animals on the earth and in the seas, the same vegetation, the
same minerals; and that though there have been incessant changes, and
possibly all these changes in one general direction, yet these changes
have never amounted to what would furnish a scientific explanation of
the forms which matter has assumed. Or, on the other hand, Science _may_
assert the possibility of going back to a far earlier condition of our
material system; may assert that all the forms of matter have grown up
under the action of laws and forces still at work; may take as the
initial state of our universe one or many enormous clouds of gaseous
matter, and endeavour to trace with more or less exactness how these
gradually formed themselves into what we see. Science has lately leaned
to the latter alternative. To a believer the alternative may be stated
thus: We all distinguish between the original creation of the material
world and the history of it ever since. And we have, nay all men have,
been accustomed to assign to the original creation a great deal that
Science is now disposed to assign to the history. But the distinction
between the original creation and the subsequent history would still
remain, and for ever remain, although the portion assigned to the one
may be less, and that assigned to the other larger, than was formerly
supposed. However far back Science may be able to push its beginning,
there still must lie behind that beginning the original act of
creation--creation not of matter only, but of the various kinds of
matter, and of the laws governing all and each of those kinds, and of
the distribution of this matter in space.

This application of the abstract doctrine of Evolution gives it an
enormous and startling expansion: so enormous and so startling that the
doctrine itself seems absolutely new. To say that the present grows by
regular law out of the past is one thing; to say that it has grown out
of a distant past in which as yet the present forms of life upon the
earth, the present vegetation, the seas and islands and continents, the
very planet itself, the sun and moon, were not yet made--and