portion to his power of thinking of his own origin, as a being endowed with body, soul, and spirit-that is to say, with mind, will, and power of action in bodily, moral, and spiritual relation, is, in fact, the veritable image and reflection of his Maker.

What, then, is to be inferred as to the probabilities of man's earliest condition? What the accommodation and occasions for the faculties and affections of such a being? Had he to pass, by some incomprehensible metempsychosis, through all conceivable grades of animated existence, till, after lying latent for incalculable ages, amidst the general life-struggle, he at length came forth a self-conscious intelligence clothed and enclosed in flesh, but with a limitless capacity of learning, loving, suffering or enjoying, looking up into the boundless heavens and seeking for his place, his God, his Maker? Was that the process of his creation? Or was he at once produced and at once provided for? Did he awaken to a sense of himself by virtue of some instinctive desire that became reason in endeavouring after its own fulfilment? Did some brutal nature incidentally assume such a monstrous deviation as to become a little like a man, and finding another of opposite sex having a similar tendency, establish a new species neither much man nor quite brute? Did the offspring of this new species refine upon their parents by select marriages and careful use of painful opportunities to better their position, until at length they began to think themselves immortal, and make provision for a change of worlds? Was man rendered.

into man by a translation out of brute nature, or at once made man? At once made man, we answer, and as man by God endowed, by God inducted to his duty and position.

On grounds already stated, if we do not assume that whatever distinguishes man from lower beings was complete in man from his beginning, perfectly ready to be elicited, educated and employed under appropriate conditions already provided, then we 'find no end, in wandering mazes lost,' and wonder whether man had any beginning, or can have any final end or purpose in his being. The necessity of assuming the primal perfection of man will be seen in its reasonableness; what is unreasonable cannot be true in any respect but that it lacks reason. What seems true to one mind is, doubtless, often seen to be false by another, and we are ever correcting our reasoning, since increased knowledge annuls the conclusions of our ignorance, and supplies those new inferences which are more in keeping with our better light. But there are inferences that never need correction, for they are always consistent with reason; and among the first principles of reason stands the inference, or rather, perhaps, the intuitive conviction, that order is inherent in God's works. This, whether inference or axiom, implies and, indeed, expresses the fact that whatever exists has a place and a purpose in consistent relation with other existences, amidst which it is but as a part of the whole. The universe is God's uttered thought, and everything, whether an atom or a world, a molecule or a man,

expresses to us somewhat of that thought, more or less clearly in proportion to our knowledge of its nature and its place. Applying this to creation as at present we witness it, we also apply it to creation as we imagine it to have been in the past, and we say it never could have been without consistency, law, order; and therefore we infer that, as we find man now occupying a position distinct and peculiar in relation to all other creatures, so must it have been when humanity began.

We put aside as not pertaining to the present argument, whatever of evidence we possess, proving that there has been interference and confusion, arising either from the necessary tendency of created will to deviate from its original rectitude, or from the laws of creation, involving the possible or permitted existence of both moral and physical evil as essential to the full manifestation of Omnipotence to the human mind, as Love, the reconciler and rectifier as well as the Creator. The supernatural will-power of man, by which he became capable of sinning against the laws of his own true nature, which are the laws of God, has evinced itself in what we see too prominently in human society to be denied. But we cannot suppose that man was originally other than a perfectly divine work, without a conflicting element in his constitution. This idea, of course, does not exclude the possibility of falling from that high estate under the influence of extraneous evil and the pressure of a temptation not provided for by man's innate power, but to be met only by Divine

means, through which man's relationship to his Maker should be more completely demonstrated to all intelligences.

If, in all departments of creation, and especially in every living thing, we find an adaptation in its nature, a fitness for its place, must we not believe that man, by common understanding acknowledged to be the highest type of being living on the earth, came from his Maker's hand as perfect for his purpose and his place as lower beings are for theirs? Each type of the 100,000 species of animals perfectly fulfils the idea of its nature in bodily form and corresponding disposition. Shall we imagine that man was created as an exception to the rule? As there is an idea or model in the constitution of each creature, that idea must have been completely expressed in the first, the directlycreated, specimen of each creature. And it is only in so far as we perceive that idea in the formation of any creature examined by us, that we find a sufficient reason for believing it to be the work of Omniscient and Almighty intelligence, a thing made with definite and wise design. In short, we believe in God as the Maker of all, because we discover something of God's thought expressed in everything we know, and we feel that the perfection and beauty of anything consist in its fulfilment of the idea which is one with its design and its 'make.' We therefore conclude that man was complete when first made; complete in all that constitutes his individual essence and excellence; complete as any creature can be. The idea, thought, design, in

tended to be expressed in the perfect constitution of man, will be precisely the likeness of the first man. But we are not capable of a full conception of that man, and our nearest approach to the formation of the necessary idea is produced in our minds by an effort to bring together in one man whatever we find most admirable in the mental character and bodily presence of the best men we know, or have ever heard of. The perfection of the first man essentially included whatever is nearest to perfection in any man; or if not, we have to account for the idea of a perfect man so far existing in our own minds either from reason or intuition.

This mode of conducting the argument before us is unavoidable. In conceiving the direct creation of man, we necessarily put aside the consideration of any hypothesis that would explain man's present state of existence by supposing his development from the germ of some lower animal, or his incidental production as the result (foreseen or unforeseen by the Maker of life and mind) of natural effort to do the best amongst an imaginary brutal ancestry. We believe in the great gulf fixed, at least psychologically, between ourselves and any brutes, a gulf not bridged over by any theory yet propounded, and therefore we might quite philosophically avoid all enquiries into our original ancestry and how we stood with 'the primates;' but nevertheless, not to ignore the disquisitions of those who shrewdly suspect themselves and us of a very low origin, occasion will perhaps be found by and by still