The materialistic evolutionist takes up the idea of a universe of material world-stuff without form, and void, but so endowed as to develop itself into orderly worlds, and adds to it this exceeding advance, that when soil, sun, and chemical laws found themselves properly related, a force in matter, latent for a million eons in the original cloud, comes forward, and dead matter becomes alive in the lowest order of vegetable life; there takes place, as Herbert Spencer says, “a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, into a definite, coherent heterogeneity, through continuous differentiation and integration.”  The dead becomes alive; matter passes from unconsciousness to consciousness; passes up from plant to animal, from animal to man; takes on power to think, reason, love, and adore.  The theistic evolutionist may think that the same process is gone through, but that an ever-present and working God superintends, guides, and occasionally bestows a new endowment of power that successively gives life, consciousness, mental, affectional, and spiritual capacity.

Is this world-theory true? and if so, is either of the [Page 185] evolution theories true also?  If the first evolution theory is true, the evolved man will hardly know which to adore most, the Being that could so endow matter, or the matter capable of such endowment.

There are some difficulties in the way of the acceptance of the nebular hypothesis that compel many of the most thorough scientists of the day to withhold their assent to its entirety.  The latest, and one of the most competent writers on the subject, Professor Newcomb, who is a mathematical astronomer, and not an easy theorist, evolving the system of the universe from the depth of his own consciousness, says:  “Should any one be sceptical as to the sufficiency of these laws to account for the present state of things, science can furnish no evidence strong enough to overthrow his doubts until the sun shall be found to be growing smaller by actual measurement, or the nebulae be actually seen to condense into stars and systems.”  In one of the most elaborate defences of the theory, it is argued that the hypothesis explains why only one of the four planets nearest the sun can have a moon, and why there can be no planet inside of Mercury.  The discovery of the two satellites to Mars and of the planet Vulcan makes it all the worse for these facts.

Some of the objections to the theory should be known by every thinker.  Laplace must have the cloud “diffused in consequence of excessive heat,” etc.  Helmholtz, in order to account for the heat of the contracting sun, must have the cloud relatively cold.  How he and his followers diffused the cloud without heat is not stated.