and all-merciful God.  And the historian argues that all alleged revelations can be shown to have had analogous histories; and that therefore, even if God exists, there is no one religion through which He has specially revealed Himself.  These are rough specimens solubly, so far as observation can carry us, mind with matter.  The great gulf between the two has at last been spanned.  The bridge across it, that was so long seen in dreams and despaired of, has been thrown triumphantly—­a solid compact fabric, on which a hundred intellectual masons are still at work, adding stone on ponderous stone to it.  Science, to put the matter in other words, has accomplished these three things.  Firstly, to use the words of a well-known writer, ’it has established a functional relation to exist between every fact of thinking, willing, or feeling, on the one side, and some molecular change in the body on the other side.’  Secondly, it has connected, through countless elusive stages, this organic human body with the universal lifeless matter.  And thirdly, it claims to have placed the universal matter itself in a new position for us, and to exhibit all forms of life as developed from it, through its own spontaneous motion.  Thus for the first time, beyond the reach of question, the entire sensible universe is brought within the scope of the physicist.  Everything that is, is matter moving.  Life itself is nothing but motion of an infinitely complex kind.  It is matter in its finest ferment.  The first traceable beginnings of it are to be found in the phenomenon of crystallisation; we have there, we are told by the highest scientific authority, ’the first gropings of the so-called vital force;’ and we learn from the same quarter, that between these and the brain of Christ there is a difference in degree only, not in kind:  they are each of them ’an assemblage of molecules, acting and re-acting according to law.’ ‘We believe,’ says Dr. Tyndall, ’that every thought and every feeling has its definite mechanical correlative—­that it is accompanied by a certain breaking up and re-marshalling of the atoms of the brain.’  And though he of course admits that to trace out the processes in detail is infinitely beyond our powers, yet ‘the quality of the problem and of our powers,’ he says, ’are, we believe, so related, that a mere expansion of the latter would enable them to cope with the former.’  Nowhere is there any break in Nature; and ‘supposing,’ in Dr. Tyndall’s words, ’a planet carved from the sun, set spinning on an axis, and sent revolving round the sun at a distance equal to that of our earth,’ science points to the conclusion that as the mass cooled, it would flower out in places into just such another race as ours—­creatures of as large discourse, and, like ourselves, looking before and after.  The result is obvious.  Every existing thing that we can ever know, or hope to know, in the whole inward as well as in the whole outward world—­everything