[Page 189] Of some things we feel very sure: that matter was once without form and void, and darkness rested on the face of the mighty deeps; that, instead of chaos, we have now cosmos and beauty; and that there is some process by which matter has been brought from one state to the other. Whether, however, the nebular hypothesis lays down the road travelled to this transfiguration, we are not sure. Some of it seems like solid rock, and some like shifting quicksand. Doubtless there is a road from that chaos to this fair cosmos. The nebular hypothesis has surveyed, worked, and perfected many long reaches of this road, but the rivers are not bridged, the chasms not filled, nor the mountains tunnelled. When men attempt to roll the hypothesis of evolution along the road of the nebular hypothesis of worlds, and even beyond to the production of vegetable and animal life, mind and affection, the gaps in the road become evident, and disastrous. A soul that has reached an adoration for the Supreme Father cares not how he has made him. Doubtless the way God chose was the best. It is as agreeable to have been thought of and provided for in the beginning, to have had a myriad ages of care, and to have come from the highest existent life at last, as to have been made at once, by a single act, out of dust. The one who is made is not to say to the Maker, "Why hast thou formed me in this or that manner?" We only wish the question answered in what manner we were really made. Evolution, without constant superintendence and occasional new inspiration of power, finds some tremendous chasms in the road it travels. These must be spanned by the power of a present God or the airy imagination [Page 190] of man. Dr. McCosh has happily enumerated some of these tremendous gaps over which mere force cannot go. Given, then, matter with mechanical power only, what are the gaps between it and spirituality? "1. Chemical action cannot be produced by mechanical power. "2. Life, even in the lowest forms, cannot be produced from unorganized matter. "3. Protoplasm can be produced only by living matter. "4. Organized matter is made up of cells, and can be produced only by cells. Whence the first cell? "5. A living being can be produced only from a seed or germ. Whence the first vegetable seed? "6. An animal cannot be produced from a plant. Whence the first animal? "7. Sensation cannot be produced in insentient matter. "8. The genesis of a new species of plant or animal has never come under the cognizance of man, either in pre-human or post-human ages, either in pre-scientific or scientific times. Darwin acknowledges this, and says that, should a new species suddenly arise, we have no means of knowing that it is such. "9. Consciousness--that is, a knowledge of self and its operations--cannot be produced out of mere matter or sensation. "10. We have no knowledge of man being generated out of the lower animals.