We shall not attempt to deal with the astronomical aspects of the question, or the origin of our world as a planet or the origin of the solar system. This would lead us too far afield. We shall make more progress in dealing with the questions nearest at hand, namely, the origin of the present order of things on our globe. First we must summarize the facts as we now know them in the five departments of knowledge with which we have had to deal. 1. Both matter and energy seem now to be at a standstill, so far as creation is concerned; no means being known to science whereby the fixed quantity of both with which we have to deal in this world can be increased (or diminished) in the slightest degree. 2. The origin of life is veiled in a mist that science has not dispelled and does not hope to dispel. By none of the processes that we call natural can life now be produced from the not-living. 3. Unicellular forms can come only from preexisting cells of the same kind; and even the individual cells of a multicellular organism, when once differentiated, reproduce only other cells after their own kind. 4. Species of plants and animals have wonderful powers of variation; but these variations seem to be regulated and predestined in accordance with definite laws, and in no instance known to science has this variation resulted in producing what could properly be called a distinct new kind of plant or animal. 5. Geology has been supposed to prove that there has been a long succession of distinct types of life on the globe in a very definite order extending through vast ages of time. This is now known to be a mistake. Most living forms of plants and animals are also found as fossils; but there is no possible way of telling that one kind of life lived and occupied the world before others, or that one kind of life is intrinsically older than any other or than the human race. II In view of such facts as these, what possible chance is there for a scheme of organic evolution? Must we not say that every possible form of the development theory is hereby ruled out of court? There can be no thought of the gradual development of organic nature by every-day processes in a world where such facts prevail. Rather must we say, with the force of the accumulated momentum of all that has been won by modern science, that, instead of the animals and plants on our world having arisen by a long-drawn-out process of change and development of one kind into another, there must have been just such a literal Creation at the beginning as the Bible describes. As we stand with uncovered head and bowed form in the presence of this great truth, it would seem almost like sacrilege to attempt by rhetoric to adorn it. Its inevitableness, its majesty, its transcendent importance for our generation, would only be obscured by so doing.