s and temperature, he
secretes and hatches into life an egg, or cell of throbbing protoplasm; to
this pulsating mass of jelly there comes from the unconscious abyss at
length a vague instinct, a drowsy awakening of desire; next a feeble gleam
of definite thought; reason then faintly dawns, and lo! at last this fair
universe burst into glorious light, clothed in surpassing loveliness,
throbbing with love, tender sympathy and sublime aspiration, and all
through the magic potency of blind matter and unconscious force, without
an architect or guide. O, wondrous matter, could a God do more?

O, divine science (sciolist), we bless thy name; thou hast delivered us
from the terrors of dogmatic fear! Man is but dust, and unto dust shall he
return; "let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." But ere we run riot
in the intoxication of our new-born freedom from divine law, does not the
skeptical, cautious, scientific spirit admonish us to pause a moment and
look logically at another class of possible achievements of this
wonder-working, material power. In philosophical researches, analogy is a
recognized and legitimate guide to truth. Admitting, then, that pure
matter has done all that materialism claims it has done in the past, let
us look by the light of analogy at other and graver possibilities it may
have wrought in its reckless, unrestrained creations. Time is a mighty
attribute of evolutionary divinities; its power seems next to infinite. In
a few millions of years Alexanders, Bonapartes, Bismarks, Miltons, Edisons
and Ingersols have been evolved from thoughtless chaos; now, if in limited
time (for what are millions of years to eternity) such majestic mental
forces have been developed from the inexhaustible store-house of
_intellectual nothingness_, why should bold mathematical science deem it a
"thing incredible" that in an eternity of time, with an unlimited amount
of matter for capital and infinite space for a theater of action, this
mind-evolving force may not have generated beings of almost infinite
capacities--even a monarch who sways a scepter over more worlds than
one--EVEN A GOD. Why should material philosophy cavil at the creeds which
teach a righteous judgment to come? Have not the judicial elements of
oxygen, carbon and hydrogen combined to organize on one planet at least
courts of equity and judgment seats, and crystalized into prison walls and
hand-cuffs the gallows and the hangman? Upon the established scientif