A Pagan natural philosophy, which even now dares often enough to raise its voice, would be very ready with its answer: "There, it would say, you see plainly how every thing has sprung from the pap of the earth--the primitive slime--there is no need of the far-fetched idea of an imaginary Creator--these self-existing men of the earth--these well known autocthones of the ancients--these true sons of nature--have risen up or crawled out of the fruitful slime of the earth." A deeper physiological science would, independently of every other consideration, and looking merely to the natural organization of man, scout this wild chaotic hypothesis respecting his origin from slime. For this organic frame of the human body, which has become a body of death, is still endowed with many and wonderful powers, and still encloses the hidden light of its celestial origin.--Without, however, entering further into this enquiry, which falls not within the limits here prescribed, let us rather tacitly believe that although, as the ancient history saith, man was formed out of the slime of the earth; yet it was by the same Hand which invisibly conducts each individual through life, and has more than once rescued all mankind from the brink of the abyss, that his marvellous body was framed, into which the Maker himself breathed the immortal spirit of life. This divine in-dwelling spark in man, the Heathens themselves, notwithstanding the opinion about the autocthones, recognized in the beautiful tradition or fiction of Prometheus; and many of their first spirits, philosophers, orators and poets, and grave and moral teachers, have in one form or another, and under a variety of figurative expressions, borne frequent and loud and repeated testimony to the truth of a higher spirit, a divine flame, animating the breast of man. This universal faith in the heavenly Promethean light--or as we should rather say, this spark of our bosoms--is the only thing we must here pre-suppose, and from which all our historical deductions must be taken. With the opposite doctrine--with the absolute unbelief in all which constitutes man really man--no history, and no science of history, is possible; and this is the only remark we shall here oppose to an infidelity that denies the existence of every thing high and godly. For the question respecting the creation of man, or as atheism terms it, the first springing up of the human race, is beyond the limits of history, and must be left to the decision of revelation and faith; for the question can be reached by no history, no science of history--no historical research. History begins, as this will be presently shown, with man's second step; which immediately follows his concealed origin antecedent to all history.