it worth while so much as to mention it. The most rigorous theologian of those days would have seen nothing to blame in imputing its origin to secondary causes; nothing irreligious in failing to invoke the arbitrary interference of God in its metamorphoses. If such be the conclusion to which we come respecting it, what would be the conclusion to which an Intelligence seated in it would come respecting us? It occupies an extent of space millions of miles greater than that of our solar system; we are invisible from it, and therefore absolutely insignificant. Would such an Intelligence think it necessary to require for our origin and maintenance the immediate intervention of God?” That is to say, we are too insignificant for God’s notice, because larger worlds roll through space millions of miles from us, and God would have enough to do, if at all disposed to interfere, in looking after them, without occupying his important time with terra and her Liliputian denizens. It is evident from this passage that Draper’s mind can never rise to a grand conception. It would not do to tell him that the Intelligence which superintends and controls the universe “reaches from end to end powerfully, and disposes all things mildly”; that his infinite ken “numbers the hair of our heads,” notes the sparrow’s fall, and sweeps over the immensity of space with its thronging orbs, by one and the same act of a supreme mind. The furthest is as the nearest, the smallest as the greatest, with Him who holds the universe in the hollow of his hand, and whose omnipotent will could create and conserve myriad constellations greater than Orion. In the passage just quoted Dr. Draper commits the additional blunder of confounding creation in general with a special view conveniently entertained by himself. His objection to creation, as before remarked, proceeds on the notion that creation is necessarily adverse to slow and continuous development, such as the facts of nature point out as having been the course through which the world has reached its present maturity. He does not seem able to understand that, creation having taken place, the whole set of physical phenomena which underlie recent physical theories may have come to pass, as he maintains; only we must assign a beginning. His whole disagreement with the doctrine of creation is founded on this principle of a non-beginning, though he vainly strives to make it appear that he objects to it as interfering with regular, progressive development. On page 239 he says: “Shall we, then, conclude that the solar and the starry systems have been called into existence by God, and that he has then imposed upon them by his arbitrary will laws under the control of which it was his pleasure that their movements should be made?