A soul that has reached an adoration for the Supreme Father cares not how he has made him.  Doubtless the way God chose was the best.  It is as agreeable to have been thought of and provided for in the beginning, to have had a myriad ages of care, and to have come from the highest existent life at last, as to have been made at once, by a single act, out of dust.  The one who is made is not to say to the Maker, “Why hast thou formed me in this or that manner?” We only wish the question answered in what manner we were really made.

Evolution, without constant superintendence and occasional new inspiration of power, finds some tremendous chasms in the road it travels.  These must be spanned by the power of a present God or the airy imagination [Page 190] of man.  Dr. McCosh has happily enumerated some of these tremendous gaps over which mere force cannot go.  Given, then, matter with mechanical power only, what are the gaps between it and spirituality?

“1.  Chemical action cannot be produced by mechanical power.

“2.  Life, even in the lowest forms, cannot be produced from unorganized matter.

“3.  Protoplasm can be produced only by living matter.

“4.  Organized matter is made up of cells, and can be produced only by cells.  Whence the first cell?

“5.  A living being can be produced only from a seed or germ.  Whence the first vegetable seed?

“6.  An animal cannot be produced from a plant.  Whence the first animal?

“7.  Sensation cannot be produced in insentient matter.

“8.  The genesis of a new species of plant or animal has never come under the cognizance of man, either in pre-human or post-human ages, either in pre-scientific or scientific times.  Darwin acknowledges this, and says that, should a new species suddenly arise, we have no means of knowing that it is such.

“9.  Consciousness—­that is, a knowledge of self and its operations—­cannot be produced out of mere matter or sensation.

“10.  We have no knowledge of man being generated out of the lower animals.

“11.  All human beings, even savages, are capable of forming certain high ideas, such as those of God and duty.  The brute creatures cannot be made to entertain these by any training.

[Page 191] “With such tremendous gaps in the process, the theory which would derive all things out of matter by development is seen to be a very precarious one.

The truth, according to the best judgment to be formed in the present state of knowledge, would seem to be about this:  The nebular hypothesis is correct in all the main facts on which it is based; but that neither the present forces of matter, nor any other forces conceivable to the mind of man, with which it can possibly be endowed, can account for all the facts already observed.  There is a demand for a personal volition, for an exercise of intelligence, for the following of a divine plan that embraces a final perfection through various and changeful processes.  The five great classes of facts that sustain the nebular hypothesis seem set before us to show the regular order of working.  The several facts that will not, so far as at present known, accord with that plan, seem to be set before us to declare the presence of a divine will and power working his good pleasure according to the exigencies of time and place.