the union of two microscopic
cells. "All living things come from the egg," such had been Harvey's
dictum. The result was like the tonic of a cold douche. I began to feel
cleansed and purified, as though something sticky-sweet which all my life
had clung to me had been washed away. Yet a question arose, an insistent
question that forever presses itself on the mind of man; how could these
apparently chemical and mechanical processes, which the author of the
book contented himself with recording, account for me? The spermia darts
for the egg, and pierces it; personal history begins. But what mysterious
shaping force is it that repeats in the individual the history of the
race, supervises the orderly division of the cells, by degrees directs
the symmetry, sets aside the skeleton and digestive tract and supervises
the structure?

I took up the second book, that on the philosophy of the organism, to
read in its preface that a much-to-be-honoured British nobleman had
established a foundation of lectures in a Scotch University for
forwarding the study of a Natural Theology. The term possessed me. Unlike
the old theology woven of myths and a fanciful philosophy of the decadent
period of Greece, natural theology was founded on science itself, and
scientists were among those who sought to develop it. Here was a
synthesis that made a powerful appeal, one of the many signs and portents
of a new era of which I was dimly becoming cognizant; and now that I
looked for signs, I found them everywhere, in my young Doctor, in Krebs,
in references in the texts; indications of a new order beginning to make
itself felt in a muddled, chaotic human world, which might--which must
have a parallel with the order that revealed itself in the egg! Might not
both, physical and social, be due to the influence of the same invisible,
experimenting, creating Hand?

My thoughts lingered lovingly on this theology so well named "natural,"
on its conscientiousness, its refusal to affirm what it did not prove, on
its lack of dogmatic dictums and infallible revelations; yet it gave me
the vision of a new sanction whereby man might order his life, a sanction
from which was eliminated fear and superstition and romantic hope, a
sanction whose doctrines--unlike those of the sentimental theology--did
not fly in the face of human instincts and needs. Nor was it a theology
devoid of inspiration and poetry, though poetry might be called its
complement. With all that w