and all other beings by his will, in contrast with the modern idea that they came into existence without the volition of a conscious and intelligent being making special creations, is what I present to the mind of the reader. This idea of God as a matter of belief presents, I repeat, a question of moral probabilities. The existence of the universe has to be accounted for somehow. We can not shut out this inquiry from our thoughts. The human being who never speculates, never thinks, upon the origin of his own soul, or upon the genesis of this wondrous frame of things external to himself, or upon his relations to some superior being, is a very rare animal. If he is much more than an animal, he will have some idea of these things; and the theories by which some of the most cultivated and acute intellects of our race, from the widest range of accumulated physical facts and phenomena yet gathered, have undertaken to account for the existence of species without referring them to the volition of an infinite creator, are at once a proof of the universal pressure of the question of creation upon the human mind, and of the logical necessity for treating it as a question dependent upon evidence and probability. I lay out of consideration, now, the longing of the human mind to find a personal God and Creator. This sentiment, this yearning for an infinite father, this feeling of loneliness in the universe without the idea of God, is certainly an important moral factor in the question of probability; but I omit it now from the number of proofs, because it is a sentiment, and because I wish to subject the belief in God as the Creator to the cold intellectual process by which we may discover a conformity between that hypothesis and the phenomena of Nature as a test of the probable truth. If such a conformity can be satisfactorily shown, and if the result of the process as conducted can fairly claim to be that the existence of God the Creator has by far the highest degree of probability above and beyond all other hypotheses that have been resorted to to account for our existence, the satisfaction of a moral feeling of the human heart may well become a source of happiness, a consolation in all the evils of this life, and a support in the hour of death.