whether the most scientific mind would see how to look a fact fairly in the face, or discern anything of the true relation of objects, or what to look for even in the natural world. Therefore it is no wonder that, dealing too exclusively with physical forms, elements, and forces, the realities of mental being should so often be blunderingly adverted to in the writings of scientific speculatists. They are apt to forget both beginnings and ends, or to imagine beginnings without causes and ends without consequences, simply because science as such is engaged with phenomena, or appearances, superficies and sensible qualities, and not with the reasons why things exist in their differences and relations.

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CHAPTER XII.

THE FIRST MAN A DIVINE IDEA.

CAN it be that the lowest form of man was the first? Can that have been the direct realisation, the nearest approximation of the Divine idea of a man? Can we conceive a higher style of man than He who made man? But it will be said all we know of man was included in the origin of man, and worked out by evolution, development, or natural selection: so that the Divine idea is not in the first but in the whole. A large idea, truly, but suggestive of large questions. Possibly we may draw conclusions from the doubtful data of flint axes in drift and peat bog, with other assumed evidences of man's connection with inferior and extinct races, mere homo-pithecoids, utterly at variance with the 'inexorable logic' of indisputable facts of another kind. Science is at present but a mental drift not yet settled into its ultimate deposit, but driven onwards still by a flood of conflicting forces tending to drift all minds into the indefinite. There is, however, nothing yet advanced which compels us to acknowledge that man was not created in perfect correspondence with his Maker. By holding to that belief, we shall be in possession of a

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power capable of lifting our minds above the necessity of looking into the laws of nature for the cause and origin of man, or imagining for a moment the possibility that the modes of nature's working will account for nature's own existence as it is, including man.

Science has not accounted for any one thing yet, and the science of one age is the nonsense of the next. Our own existence itself is an awful subject of thought. It is terrible as a thing to be accounted for, and yet so utterly beyond the grasp of our faculties that any attempt to explain its origin overpowers us. We should lose our reason or our life under the weight of the consciousness of Being which was before any conceivable beginning, if in mercy we were not constituted to rest satisfied in the word 'God.' We are crushed with a sense that what to our logic is impossible is yet to our reason true. We are obliged to talk and think of objects of sense, in order to divert our minds from the thought of a Being without origin. But to account for man we must believe in God, as not only man's Maker, but as the Revealer of Himself to man; for every man capable of reasoning believes in his own creation, and is endowed with a consciousness that the desire and the capacity to know more of Him who made man is a warrant for the hope and the effort to know more.

Reason, as we have said, in these days compels all men in their senses to confess that one article of faith which is the basis of all truth and true faith; at least, we know no scientific or philosophic work now read in

England which is constructed expressly to invalidate the doctrine of creation by the fiat of a Creator, except, perhaps, Büchner's Force and Matter, which excludes the Creator in right of their own eternal attributes with no will in them. We may, therefore, safely assume that man, being in existence, was certainly created in some way. Why should we ask in what way? We cannot know till we know as we are known. All we know of the mystery, at present, is that an act of creation must be the act of Omnipotent will, to which the creation of all existences is as easy as the creation of any one, but without which none could be. Man was willed to be, and he was. That is a sufficient answer to the question, 'How was man created?' and, in spite of learned captiousness, that is the final answer alike of science and of common sense.

But that conclusion does not debar us from the legitimate exercise of that quasi-creative faculty of our own minds, which, in some minute measure, may reflect, as a dewdrop reflects the sun, an image of the Divine idea. Man is mentally a constructive being, and in thought he cannot but endeavour to form a conception, by aid of scientific and natural analogies, of the process of creation by which the body of man was commenced and perfected. We are baffled at the outset: we never witnessed an act of creation, we only know that it was as easy to create the human body by one act of will as to create the universe, and no easier. Whether created of pre-existing matter or not, the fact is equally God's fiat. We may imagine a

moment when man's body was ready to be animated, the material inorganic elements being moulded together by an act of especial organising force, and yet not endowed with life, like an engine completely fitted to perform all its functions, and by its completeness showing that it waits for the power that shall inspire it with active energy. It is true that we cannot point to any instance of organisation in which life had not existed from the very germ of its development. That, probably, is the very point in which creation differed from anything which any being but the Creator ever witnessed. The act of creation was a manifestation of power which no creature perhaps ever saw or can see; the results are all that can be seen even in relation to the operations of our own wills; how, then, can we conceive the operation or modus operandi of the Divine will? All we can understand is that the forming Spirit also breathed life into man's body to make man a living soul, and that, when man arose with all his powers bound to the body and represented in bodily relation to this world, all the forces of nature were united and harmonised in his body, as now we see them, for the purpose of maintaining its functions in relation to life and mind, while the mental and moral selfhood in its consciousness and freedom asserted its connection with the Spirit that alike produces body, life, action, feeling, will, and thought. Creation and the Creator are revealed in man, the only being dwelling in our sight capable of conceiving the qualities of things and the character of their Maker. And thus man, in pro