xistence, no natural selection to account for this. What
other explanation, then, in reason is there, than to say, as those great
men of science, Sir John Herschel and Clerk Maxwell, who have, in our
day, most deeply pondered this curious fact, have said, that this
division of all the infinity of atoms in nature into a very limited
number of groups, all the billions of members in each group
substantially alike in their mechanical and chemical properties, "gives
to each of the atoms the essential characters at once of a manufactured
article and a subordinate agent."

Evolution cannot, then, be justly charged with materialism. On the
contrary, it especially demands a divine creative force as the starter
of its processes and the endower of the atoms with their peculiar
properties. The foundation of that scientific system which the greatest
of modern expositors of Evolution has built up about that principle
(Herbert Spencer's synthetic philosophy) is the persistence of an
infinite, eternal, and indestructible force, of which all things that we
see are the manifestations.

To suppose, as many of the camp-followers of the evolution philosophy
do, that the processes of successive change and gradual modification,
which have been so clearly traced out in nature, relieve us from the
need or right of asking for any anterior and higher cause of these
processes; or that because the higher and finer always unfolds from the
lower and coarser, therefore there was really nothing else in existence,
either at the beginning or at present, than these crude elements which
alone disclose themselves at first; and that these gross, sensuous facts
are the only source and explanation of all that has followed them,--this
is a most superficial and inadequate view. For this explanation, as we
have already noticed, furnishes no fountain-head of power to maintain
the constant upward-mounting of the waters in the world's conduits. It
furnishes no intelligent directions of these streams into ever wise and
ordered channels. To explain the higher life that comes out of these low
beginnings, we must suppose the existence of spiritual powers, unseen at
first, and disclosing themselves only in the fuller, later results, the
moral and spiritual phenomena that are the crowning flower and fruit of
the long process. When a thing has grown from a lower to a higher form,
its real rank in nature is not shown by what it began in, but by what it
has become. Though c