that in the germs of animals, as in the history of the production of animated Nature through long ages, there are first greater unity and simplicity, and then specific varieties more and more divergent.
3. I have never set myself, as too many religious men unwisely did, against the theory, first started, it would appear, by Kant, then elaborated by Sir William Herschel and Laplace, and perfected, I believe, by a professor in Princeton College, that the mundane system may have been formed out of original matter, evolved according to the mechanical laws with which it is endowed—first the outer planets, then the inner, and finally the sun condensed into the centre. This never appeared to me to be an irreligious doctrine, though Laplace was unhappily a man without religion.
4. Once more, I have ever stood up for a doctrine of Development. There is a development of one form of matter from another, of one force from another. There is, as every one allows, a development of the plant and animal from the parent. I see nothing irreligious in holding that the bird may have been evolved by numerous transitions from the reptile, and the living horse the old horse of the Eocene formation. An accumulation of powers, new conditions and surroundings may, it is acknowledged, produce a variety which may become hereditary. Let us suppose that they can also, in rare cases of combination, produce species: religion is not thereby undermined, either in its evidences or in its essential doctrines.
The question now arises and presses itself upon us: Can we by these acknowleged agencies explain the whole of the present state of the universe, with all its fitnesses, its harmonies, its beauty, its utility, its beneficence? The development theory, in the narrow and exclusive form which it commonly takes, overlooks vastly more than it notices. In particular, there are four grand truths kept out of sight. Without these, we cannot understand the Cosmos. When these are introduced, they bring God into his own universe, and fill it with life and love.
1. God is present in all his Works, and acts in all their Actings.—This is the religious doctrine. "By him all things consist." Paul, addressing the men of Athens, said: "For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring." This doctrine may be so stated as to make it pantheistic. It is the one grand truth contained in pantheism, giving it all its plausibility, and making it superior to that bald theism which makes God create the world at first, and then stand by and see it go. The doctrine can be so stated as to free it from all such tendencies on the one side or the other, so as to make God distinct from all his works, and yet acting in them. This is, I believe, the philosophical doctrine. It has been held by the greatest thinkers which our world has produced, such as Descartes, Leibnitz, Berkeley,
