SOPHEREUS. I think that your question can be answered. Creation is the act of giving existence to something that did not previously exist. We see such acts performed by men, very frequently, so that we do not hesitate to speak of the product as a created thing. We do not see acts of creation performed by the Infinite Power, but it is surely not unphilosophical to suppose that what can be and is done by finite human faculties, can be and has been done by the infinite faculties of the Deity, and done upon a scale and in a perfection that transcend everything that human power has produced. The sense in which I have been led to conceive of the solar system as a creation is the same as that by which I represent to myself the production, by human power and skill, of some physical object which never existed before, such as a machine, a statue, a picture, a pyramid, or an obelisk; any concrete object which, whether or not new of its kind, did not as an individual object previously exist. In weighing the probabilities as to the mode in which the solar system came to exist, the reasons why the idea of its special creation stands by far the highest in the scale are these: 1. There must have been a period when this great object in nature did not exist, and therefore it must have been caused to exist. 2. The necessary hypothesis of a causing power leads inevitably to the conclusion that the power was adequate to the production of a system of bodies so proportioned and arranged that they would act on each other by certain fixed rules. 3. The causing or creating power must have conceived the proportions and arrangements of the different bodies as a plan, and must have executed that plan according to the conception. 4. While as a theory we can represent to ourselves that the causing power established certain laws of matter and motion, which would by their fixed operation on crude substances lying in the universe produce this system of bodies without any preconceived and predetermined plan, without any occasional or special interposition, yet that the system, as we find it, is a product of such a nature as to have called for and required the special interposition of a formative will. For, if we proceed upon the hypothesis that this enormous and exact mechanism was nothing but the product of certain pre-established laws operating on crude matter, without direct and special interposition exerted in the execution of a formed design, we have to obtain some definite conception, and to find some proof of a method by which these laws can have operated to produce this system of bodies exactly as we know them to be proportioned and arranged. Astronomical science, and all other science, has not discovered, or even suggested, any method by which this result could have been brought about, without a special act of creation in the execution of an original design. On the other hand, the hypothesis of a special interposition in the execution of a