There has been war among the intelligences of God's spiritual creation. Lucifer, son of the morning, has fallen like fire from heaven; and our present earth, existing as a half-extinguished hell, has received him and his angels. Dead matter exists, and in the unembodied spirits vitality exists; but not yet in all the universe of God has the vitality been united to the matter; animal life, to even the profound apprehension of the fallen angel, is an inconceivable idea. Meanwhile, as the scarce reckoned centuries roll by, vacantly and dull, like the cheerless days and nights over the head of some unhappy captive, the miserable prisoners of our planet become aware that there is a slow change taking place in the condition of their prison-house. Where a low, dark archipelago of islands raise their flat backs over the thermal waters, the heat glows less intensely than of old; the red fire bursts forth less frequently; the dread earthquake shakes more rarely; save in a few centres of intenser action, the great deep no longer boils like a pot; and though the heavens are still shut out by a gray ceiling of thick vapor, through which sun or moon never yet appeared, a less gloomy twilight struggles at noonday through the enveloping cloud, and falls more cheerfully than heretofore upon land and sea. At length there comes a morning in which great ocean and the scattered islands declare that God the Creator had descended to visit the earth. The hitherto verdureless land bears the green flush of vegetation; and there are creeping things among the trees. Nor is the till now unexampled mystery of animal life absent from the sounds and bays. It is the highest intelligences that manifest the deepest interest in the works of the All Wise. Nor can we doubt that on that morning of creative miracle, in which matter and vitality were first united in the bonds of a strange wedlock, the comprehensive intellect of the great fallen spirit--profound and active beyond the lot of humanity--would have found ample employment in attempting to fathom the vast mystery, and in vainly asking what these strange things might mean.