it takes it out of the category of events such as that which brings the suet to the nuthatch. The Natural Providence is not intermittent, it is perennial; but it takes no thought of me or you. It is life that is flexible and adaptive, and not matter and force. “We do not,” says Renan, “remark in the universe any sign of deliberate and thoughtful action. We may affirm that no action of this sort has existed for millions of centuries.” I think we may affirm more than that--we may affirm that it never existed. Some vestige of the old theology still clung to Renan’s mind--there was a day of creation in which God set the universe going, and then left it to run itself; the same vestige clung to Darwin’s mind and led him to say that in the beginning God must have created a few species of animals and vegetables and then left them to develop and populate the world. Says Renan, “When a chemist arranges an experiment that is to last for years, everything which takes place in his retort is regulated by the laws of absolute unconsciousness; which does not mean that a will has not intervened at the beginning of the experiment, and that it will not intervene at the end.” There was no beginning nor will there be any ending to the experiment of creation; the will is as truly there in the behavior of the molecules at one time as at another. The effect of Renan’s priestly training and associations clings to him like a birthmark. In discussing these questions our plumb-line does not touch bottom, because there is no bottom. “In the infinite,” says Renan with deeper insight, “negations vanish, contradictions are merged”; in other words, opposites are true. Where I stand on the surface of the sphere is the center of that surface, but that does not prevent the point where you stand being the center also. Every point is a center, and the sky is overhead at one place as at another; opposites are true. The moral and intellectual worlds present the same contradictions or limitations--the same relatively of what we call truth.