r upon the great underlying verities of our
being, nor Tyndall jump the iron track of his own principles to
smuggle into matter a 'potency and promise' of all 'life.' Huxley
cannot play fast and loose with human volition, nor juggle the
trustiness of memory into a state of consciousness, to save his
system; nor may Haeckel lead us at his own sweet creative will through
fourteen stages of vertebrate and eight of invertebrate life up to
the great imaginary 'monera,' the father and mother of us all. It will
be time to believe a million things in a lump when one of them is
fully proved in detail. We have no disposition, even with so eminent
an authority as St. George Mivart, to denominate Natural Selection 'a
puerile hypothesis.' We will promise to pay our respects to our 'early
progenitor' of 'arboreal habits' and 'ears pointed and capable of
movement,' when he is honestly identified by his ear-marks, and even
to worship the original fire-mist when that is properly shown to be
our only Creator, Preserver, and Bountiful Benefactor.

"Meantime, as a late king of Naples was said to have erected the
negation of God into a system of government, not a few eager
investigators seem to have assumed it as a basis of science. And so we
reach out by worship 'mostly of the silent sort' toward the unknown
and unknowable, the 'reservoir of organic force, the single source of
power,' ourselves 'conscious automatons' in whom 'mind is the product
of the brain,' thought, emotion, and will are but 'the expression of
molecular changes,' to whom all speculations in divinity are a
'disregard of the proper economy of time,' and to whom, also, as one
of them has declared, 'earth is Paradise,' and all beyond is blank.
But it was Mephistopheles who said,--

"'The little god of this world sticks to the same old way,
And is as whimsical as on creation's day;
Life somewhat better might content him,
But for the gleam of heavenly light which thou hast lent him.
He calls it Reason--thence his power's increased
To be far beastlier than any beast.
Saving thy gracious presence, he to me
A long-legged grasshopper seems to be,
That springing flies and flying springs,
And in the grass the same old ditty sings.
Would he still lay among the grass he grows in.'

"But even the man of theories might grant that the scheme of one
great, governing, guiding, loving, and holy God is a theory that works
wonders in practice