supporting life; yet the eager champion of the theory of many
worlds will have them all in these life-bearing or life-supporting
stages, none in any of the stages of preparation, none in any of the
stages of decrepitude or death.

This has probably had its origin in no small degree from the disfavour
with which in former years the theory of the growth and development of
planets and systems of planets was regarded. Until the evidence became
too strong to be resisted, the doctrine that our earth was once a baby
world, with many millions of years to pass through before it could be
the abode of life, was one which only the professed atheist (so said too
many divines) could for a moment entertain; while the doctrine that not
the earth alone, but the whole of the solar system, had developed from a
condition utterly unlike that through which it is now passing, could
have had its origin only in the suggestions of the Evil One. Both
doctrines were pronounced to be so manifestly opposed to the teachings
of Moses, and not only so, but so manifestly inconsistent with the
belief in a Supreme Being, that--that further argument was unnecessary,
and denunciation only was required. So confident were divines on these
points, that it would not have been very wonderful if some few students
of science had mistaken assertion for proof, and so concluded that the
doctrines towards which science was unmistakably leading them really
were inconsistent with what they had been taught to regard as the Word
of God. Whether multiplied experiences taught men of science to wait
before thus deciding, or however matters fell out, it certainly befell
before very long that the terrible doctrine of cosmical development was
supported by such powerful evidence, astronomical and terrestrial, as to
appear wholly irresistible. Then, not only was the doctrine accepted by
divines, but shown to be manifestly implied in the sacred narrative of
the formation of the earth and heavens, sun, and moon, and stars; while
upon those unfortunate students of science who had not changed front in
good time, and were found still arguing on the mistaken assumption that
the development of our system was not accordant with that ancient
narrative, freshly forged bolts were flung from the Olympus of
orthodoxy.

So far as the other argument--from the inconsistency of the development
theory with belief in a Supreme Being--was concerned, the student of
science was independent of the in