more fully to consider what they say. In the meantime, a few indisputable facts and circumstances, in respect of mankind in general, demand attention. The examination of those circumstances and facts will prepare us the better to think of man's place and nature. We shall see that while an awful mystery hangs over our existence,

And out of darkness come the hands

That reach through nature, moulding men,

(TENNYSON)

yet the Power that fashioned man fixed a divine impress on his body and also imparted a mind to read its meaning.

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CHAPTER XIII.

PARENTAGE, INDIVIDUALITY, PERSONALITY, GOD.

1. FIRST, there is the grand fact, every living being on earth has sprung from a parentage, from other beings more or less like itself.

Reasoning on this fact as the demonstration of a law imposed on all vitalised nature, to what conclusion are we conducted but that, at the very creation of that nature, parentage was included as a condition of the perpetuation of life? And if so, every kind of living being was created at the beginning, as distinct and perfect according to its kind as any of its offspring can be. Parentage is a law of living existence as we now see it, and therefore if living existence, as we see it, is created existence, parentage of kinds must have been a law essentially in the creation at first. There is no other mode of life now but that derived from parentage, like begetting like with limited variation. This is a fact asserting itself, and any hypothesis asserting the contrary has to account for the existence of parentage as a universal law, and at the same time to prove that it is not wanted, by showing some other mode of derivation sufficient for the purpose of producing

all known kinds of life. done.

But this has not yet been

Certain plants may be perpetuated by buds, cuttings, and offshoots. The common freshwater polype, too, being divided into several parts, each part becomes a perfect polype. Aphides, and some other creatures, are produced from each other through several successive lives without sexes. These facts prove the wonderful diversity of operation in nature. What is a bud, a cutting, an offshoot? A new plant derived in each case from a parent as much as a seed itself. And what does, the division of the polype, spontaneous or otherwise, indicate? Only that the definite form of life existing in the whole polype is also existing in every part of it, so that, as in the case of buds and cuttings from the parent plant, a new being similar to the parent is germinally formed in every enlargement or increase of its own organisation, each organised part or limb being in fact a repetition in embryo of the original or parent individual. The polype thus propagates itself by throwing off germs, at first rooted like a bud or a branch in its own stem. It is a parent in the entire sense, producing its own likeness in every additional growth of its own body, without the intervention or influence of another life. Cut off its head, and that head produces body and tail; cut off its tail and that produces body and head. There is something, some specific life-force, in each part capable of evolving the perfect animal in exact and undeviating resemblance to the parent organism from which it was detached. There is, so to say,

the spirit, vitalism, and avitism of a seed in every portion of the animal-and something more; there is the full operation of that vis medicatrix, which, in certain animals, such as the lobster, reproduces a lost member. In every case, however, like produces like, the bud being in reality possessed of more likeness to its parent than a seed or an egg, because in these there may be variation through influence of likeness to either parent more or less impressed upon the offspring. Thus a branch of a tree is more constantly like its parent tree, than it might be if it sprang from a seed to which an influence from two different trees gave origin. The aphis, the familiar little green insect, the blight so annoying to cultivators of hops and roses, multiplies in an odder and still more mysterious manner. This insect increases both sexually and asexually; they produce, so to say, internal buds, which become young aphides, and this may go on perhaps for twenty successions. This propagation by partheno-genesis, and by cuttings, buds, bulbs, germs, and offshoots, secures the perpetuation of likeness to the original in a higher degree than propagation by seed, because in the case of seed there is the united influence of whatever variation may exist in the two parents essential to the production of the tertium quid. The asexual increase is, if possible, a stronger evidence of creation in kinds than even the sexual mode of multiplication, since there is no deviation in the slightest degree from the original type in the former case. We have, then, the authority and right derived from our knowledge

of creation as we see it, to assert that mankind, like every other known kind of being, must have sprung from a parentage created of a nature similar to that we witness.

It is, of course, possible that more than one pair of human beings have been created. That, however, is another question, with which we have nothing now to do. But if parentage is a law included in creation, one human pair must have been created. And if it be a law in creation, it proves the completion of the creation of which it is a law. Why? Simply because that law was intended to perpetuate what was created. To suppose parentage as a universal law to co-exist with repeated acts of creation would be absurd. Production by parentage, the propagation of kinds, being included as a law in creation, it would only be for the purpose of superseding the necessity of repeating the creative fiat.

As regards man, at least, mediate creation, when viewed with the reverence its holy mysteries demand, reveals to us, even more wondrously than the immediate creation of each individual could have done, the benevolent operation of the Omnipotent will which produced and perpetuated that law. To it are due all the interests of family and kindred, all the teaching love of children, all the heavenly freshness, the almightiness of that appeal which the feeble infant makes to the living mother, on whose prepared bosom the hand of God has laid it with all its wants.

It is parentage that connects the whole race of man, as one in all its history, its joys and its sorrows, its sins,