I merely contend that whatever were the means by which dead matter first lived, they were higher, infinitely higher, than matter and motion; they could only have been the resources of a _competent_ power. I adopt gladly the language of Professor Huxley: ‘Belief, in the scientific sense of the word,’ he says, ‘is a serious matter, and needs strong foundations. To say, therefore, in the admitted absence of evidence, that I have any belief as to the mode in which existing forms of life have originated, would be using words in a wrong sense. But expectation is permissible where belief is not; and if it were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions, which it can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from not-living matter.’[21] So should I. [Footnote 21: _Critiques and Addresses_, p. 239.] By what other means than by the operation of natural ‘laws’ can we think of the Infinite Power, extending through all extent, as the fountain of all being, as acting? Every process of nature that ever man has investigated throughout all space and all time, results from a perfect and unalterable method which we call a ‘law’ of nature. Then why should the primal process, by which not-living matter became, once for all, living, be brought about by any other means than the predetermined action of competent natural laws? Because life—living matter—does not _now_ arise directly from that which is not-life, does it follow that the creative method was discontinuous? that the primordial creative laws willed into operation ‘in the beginning’ were only competent to evolve the inorganic and not-living? and that at this point a supernatural ‘interference,’ a ‘miraculous interposition,’ had to be effected to endow what was dead with the transcendent properties of life? The whole line of human experience, interpreted in the light of modern scientific knowledge, compels the conclusion that the ‘primordial germs’ in which life on earth began, arose by the operation of natural creative laws. That an energy, not now operating within the area of our experience, was at work, when not-living matter progressed into living structure, is certain. But there is nothing, within the range of our knowledge, that permits the inference that it was brought about by any other means, than such as, if we could have seen them in operation, we should have called ‘laws’ of nature. This view surely ennobles without limit our fatally humanized view of creative action. ‘The beginning’ was thus, by the unsearchable mystery of a creative mind and will, the _potentiality_ of all the universe through all its duration; which it only required ‘time’ in which the potential powers and modes should operate, to make actual, in the universe we see.