He did not come there by spontaneous generation--that is to say, by any creative force or organizing power inherent in matter. Scientific observation overturns more and more, every day, this hypothesis, which, in other respects also, it is impossible to admit as any explanation of the first appearance upon the earth of the complete man, the man in a condition to survive. "Another delusion of which we must rid ourselves," said, lately, a member of the Academy of Sciences, as he quitted the lecture-room where M. Pasteur had been throwing upon this subject the light of his luminous and scrupulous criticism. The hypothesis of the progressive transformation of species does not explain better the existence of man, such as we now see him upon the earth. {241} This hypothesis is also rejected by the exact student of facts; even if admitted, it would still leave existing the same problems; for, whence came these primitive types, whose successive transformations have, as supposed, produced the existing species? God is as necessary to create the ape or the primitive type of the ape as he is necessary to create man himself. Scientific cosmology accords with scientific psychology. God, the creator and instructor of man, is the grand fact which each of these sciences encounters at the summit of its labors. The whole current of history contains the same teaching. I admit that error abounds in history, that it is full of false assertions, of recitals tortured from the truth, facts mutilated, legends invented by men as imaginations. It is not, for all that, the less certain that in a great part the truth still remains there, that certain historical events are authenticated and attested by undeniable testimony. I mention here only two, because connected with the subject which engages me. {242} It is a general belief, a universal tradition in the history of nations, that, either at the moment of the creation, or at some epoch subsequent to creation, the God, or the gods, whom those nations respectively adored, had had direct relations with man; had become manifest to him by different acts or under different forms, and had assumed a place and exercised an active influence upon man's destinies. The idea of a single revelation, or of a succession of revelations--revelations characterized at one time by a strange grossness, at another by a subtle mysticism, is a thing ever recurring in the history of humanity. The tradition of the special revelation, proclaimed first by the Hebrews, and after them by the Christians, is equally undeniable; criticism may apply itself to the volumes that contain the accounts; may contest the authenticity or exactitude or date of particular books; but so far from ever negativing, it will not even weaken the evidence of the existence and the powerful influence of the religious tradition which gave birth to Judaism and to Christianity. {243} We have here a remarkable historical fact, manifesting at once