Time of itself does nothing; but nothing can be done without time. It is not a personal agent, but a necessary condition. We cannot even think, much less reason, of things as occurring out of time and independently of it, any more than we can think or reason of matter as existing independent of space. Every occurrence takes time: and yet we may not leap from this fact to the conclusion that a countless multitude of occurrences will require a vast duration of time. Professor Tyndal, in his Lecture on the Scientific Use of the Imagination, refers to waves of light less than 1/50000 of an inch in length. How many do you suppose of such waves would be required to compass a mile? How many to accomplish the 185,000 miles which light travels in a second? Each undulation is a separate occurrence, so that we have millions of millions of occurrences following one upon another in a second of time. In studying, therefore, the complete fabric of the globe, or even of the whole material universe as far as it comes within our ken, the problem for solution is not whether these great results could or could not have been brought to pass in an indefinitely short space of time, in the twinkling of an eye, as one might say, but whether the space of time employed in their production has actually and in fact been indefinitely short or indefinitely long. We ought also to bear in mind that the terms we use when we speak of _long_ and _short_, are relative not absolute--relative to the duration of our own lives, or to some other arbitrary standard which we are pleased to set up for purposes of comparison. Thus a year is long compared with a minute, but short compared with a millennium; a thousand years would be an enormous length for the life of a mortal man, but compared with the ceaseless flow of ages, which we call eternity, this same thousand years becomes, as it were, an imperceptible speck, less than a drop of water compared to the Atlantic, a point of time so inconceivably minute, that no human mind could grasp it as an intelligible unit of measurement. For time, we have an inexhaustible past on which to draw. Against any given theory of production, no objection pure and simple that the theory makes too large a demand upon time, can be maintained. An objection, to be valid against the existence of life on the earth a million of years back, must postulate that there was no earth then in existence, or none capable of supporting life; for if we choose to stand by the doctrine of final causes, life upon the earth must have begun as soon as life upon the earth was possible, otherwise we should have a fair and perfect design with its purpose unaccomplished; or, if we prefer the Theory of Development carried out to its legitimate consequences, equally must we admit, that as soon as the earth was fitted for living creatures, living creatures would be generated upon it.