orms, and all worms
grew from invisible animalculae, and that the animalculae flashed into
life by the chemical contact of the materials of the protoplasm, and
that the protoplasm was a natural crop of the cooling globe, and that
the cooling globe condensed itself out of fire mist or nebulae or star
dust, I demand to know how does all that enable me to get rid of the law
of causation? It is a necessary law of my nature to believe that every
effect demands an adequate cause. It is equally a law of my nature to
believe that every compound, or composite substance, is an effect, that
the compound did not compound itself.

Here is a great effect--a universe in solution, with all the chemical
constituents of our globe and solar system floating in it, and all their
laws of chemical affinity and proportion, and all their electrical
attractions and repulsions, in full operation (else we would never get a
universe to thicken down out of it); and besides, all the potencies of
vegetable and animal life, and all the great powers of the human mind,
in a rather vaporous condition, it is true, but still all
there--Socrates, Seneca and Solomon, Moses, Solon and Blackstone, Homer,
Milton and Shakespeare, Demosthenes, Cicero and Daniel Webster, Watt,
Stephenson, Fulton and Morse, popes, puritans and evolutionists,
universities and newspapers and congresses, the United States and the
British Empire, and the rest of mankind--all boiled up into Mr.
Tyndall's potencies, but all there in potency, just as truly as they
ever were here in fact. Well! here is a great effect just as
imperatively demanding a great First Cause as the world afterward formed
out of it. These substances did not make themselves then, any more than
the resulting persons or paving stones make themselves now, and they did
not endow themselves with these potencies, nor calculate and establish
these laws of chemical combination in exact proportion, nor determine
scientifically the laws of gravitation and electricity and light and
heat, before they came into being; which must have all been established
before a single particle of the star dust could begin to cool, or to
approach another. The very first idea of matter or of force we can form
demands law, and law is merely another name for the divine order of
Nature. Whatever foundation for Natural Religion, for faith in God as
the Creator and Governor of the world, is afforded by the existing order
of the world, it is in no degr