ame food that makes the flesh and it will continue to be formed
regardless of the variety or quality of the food. Why do certain
particles become flesh or nails? Who can draw the division line between
them? With marvelous instruments and wondrous skill science has explored
and mapped and charted the "tabernacle of clay," but it cannot throw a
single ray of light upon the intelligence that animates it.

Materialism fails sadly enough in that direction, but still worse as a
satisfactory interpretation of the panorama of the life about us. It is
a philosophy of the gloomiest fatalism. It holds that we simply chance
to be that which we are; that we are what we are merely because of
fortuitous chemical and mechanical combinations. Had the combinations
chanced to be something different we should not be in existence. Chance
is the king of the materialist's world.

According to this theory all abilities are the gifts of nature and all
lack of them is the blind award of chance. No credit whatever is due to
anybody for what he is, nor can anybody be logically blamed for his
deficiencies. All are like men who, with closed eyes, draw something
from a bag under compulsion. It is not to the credit of one that he got
a prize nor to the discredit of another that he drew a blank. This
hypothesis holds that recently we were not and that presently we shall
cease to be; that we appear by chance, live our brief period, suffer or
enjoy as it may happen and then pass to the oblivion of eternal silence;
that all the thought, all the toil and the striving, all the effort and
endurance were for nothing, and accomplished nothing. Such a philosophy
will not long survive the progress of our age. It lacks the balance of
nature's principle of conservation. It lacks the completeness of
universal law. It lacks the element of justice that is enthroned in
every human consciousness and without which life would be a meaningless
mockery and the world a chaos of despair.

But the materialist's philosophy has no monopoly of bad points or
undesirable beliefs. The old popular idea of a mechanical creation is
equally at war with both fact and reason. That belief is that God
created the world as men build houses, and added the human beings as men
furnish their houses when built. It is the belief that He is still
making souls as fast as bodies are being born in the world, that these
souls begin their existence at birth, live here but one life and then
pass on in