And if I am answered, that the success is owing to hereditary tendencies, and to the laws by which the offspring resembles the parents, I answer:  Is not that a greater wonder still?  A wonder which all the discoveries of the scalpel and the microscope have been as yet unable, and will be, I believe, to the last unable, to unravel, even to touch?  A wonder which can be explained by no theories of vibratory atoms, vital forces, plastic powers of nature, or other such phrases, which are but metaphysical abstractions, having no counterpart in fact, and only hiding from us our ignorance of the vast and venerable unknown.  The physiologist, when he considers the manifold combination of innumerable microscopic circumstances which are required to bring any one creature into the world with a perfectly hearing ear, ought to confess that the chances—­if the world were governed by chance—­are infinitely greater in favour of a child’s being born with an imperfect ear rather than with a perfect one.  And if he should evade the difficulty; and try to explain the usual success by saying that nature is governed by law:  I answer—­What is nature?  What is law?  You never saw nature nor law either under the microscope.  They too are metaphysical abstractions, necessary notions and conceptions of your own brain.  You have seen nothing but the fact and the custom; and all you can do, if you be strictly rational, is with a certain modern school to say, with a despairing humility, which I deplore while I respect—­deploring it because it is needless despair, and yet respecting it because it is humility, which is the path out of despair and darkness into hope and light—­to say with them, “Man can know nothing of causes, he can only register positive facts.”  This, I say, is one path—­one which I trust none here will tread.  The only other path, I believe, is, to go back to the lessons which we ought to have learnt in our childhood, for those to whom the human race owes most learnt them thousands of years ago; and to ascribe the ever successful miracles of nature to a Will, to a Mind, to a Providence so like that which each of us exercises in his own petty sphere, that we are not only able to understand in part the works of God, but to know from the very fact of being able to understand them—­as one of our greatest astronomers has so well said lately—­that we are made in the image of God.  To say with the old Psalmist, that the universe is governed by “a law which cannot be broken:”  but why?  Because God has given it that law.  To say “All things continue as they were at the beginning:”  but why?  Because all things serve Him in whom we live and move and have our being.  To confess the mystery and miracle of our mortal bodies, and say with David, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made; such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me, I cannot attain unto it:”  but to add the one only rational explanation of the mystery which, thank God, common sense has taught, though it may be often in confused and defective forms, to the vast majority of the human race in all times and all lands—­that He who grasps the mystery and works the miracle is God; that “His eye sees our substances yet being imperfect; and in His book are all our members written, which day by day were fashioned, when as yet there were none of them.”