and mind in the first parents was an occasional and special exercise of the divine power. It was not a miraculous exercise of power, because a miracle, in the proper sense, implies some action aside from a previously established course of things. It was simply a first exercise of the power in the case of the creation of the first human pair; that is, it was the establishment in them, specially, of the union of the body and soul. Its repetition in the offspring, for all time, and through successive generations, was left to the operation of the laws of procreation and heredity. The nature and operation of those laws are wrapped in mystery; but about the fact of their existence, and of the compound procreation of a new body and a new mind at every new birth, there can be no doubt whatever. It seems to me that this hypothesis has in its favor a vast preponderance of probability, because-- 1. The generation of mind or spirit out of matter is inconceivable. 2. The creation of mind by the Almighty is just as conceivable as his creation of a material organism; and the latter is conceded by all naturalists who admit that there was a first animal organism; and even some of the evolutionists hold that the first animal organism was directly fashioned by the Creator, although all the succeeding organisms were formed, as they contend, by natural and sexual selection. 3. The nature of mind--of the human mind--is the same in all individuals of the race. They may differ in mental power, but they all possess an intellectual principle that is the same in kind. To the production of mind, or its formation, the process of evolution was not necessary. Not only was it unnecessary, but in the nature of things it was not adapted to do what it is supposed to have done in the production of physical organisms. To suppose that the Creator, instead of the direct exercise of his power of creation, left it to the material laws of natural and sexual selection to produce a mind, is to suppose him to have resorted to a method that was both unnecessary and indirect, and was furthermore incapable of effecting that kind of product. In reasoning about the methods of the Creator, it is certainly irrational to suppose him to have resorted to one that was so ill adapted to the accomplishment of his object. In the accomplishment of some physical objects, we may well suppose that they have been brought about by physical agencies that have operated very slowly and indirectly; and we can see that this has often been the case in regard to many material products. But for the production of mind, for the accomplishment of a spiritual existence, there can be imagined no secondary agencies, no gradual growth out of antecedent existences or substances, no evolution out of some other and that other a material organism. The first mind, the first human soul, must have come direct from the hand and will of God. The succeeding minds may well have been