Creator?"

"I said the term was an absurd one," rejoined the curate.

"Never mind the term then: you admit the fact?" said Faber.

"What fact?" asked Wingfold.

"That in a certain liquid, where all life has been destroyed, and where
no contact with life is admitted, life of itself appears," defined the
doctor.

"No, no; I admit nothing of the sort," cried Wingfold. "I only admit
that the evidence seems in favor of believing that in some liquids that
have been heated to a high point, and kept from the air, life has yet
appeared. How can I tell whether _all_ life already there was first
destroyed? whether a yet higher temperature would not have destroyed yet
more life? What if the heat, presumed to destroy all known germs of life
in them, should be the means of developing other germs, further removed?
Then as to _spontaneity_, as to life appearing of itself, that question
involves something beyond physics. Absolute life can exist only of and
by itself, else were it no perfect thing; but will you say that a mass
of protoplasm--that _proto_ by the way is a begged question--exists by
its own power, appears by its own will? Is it not rather there because
it can not help it?"

"It is there in virtue of the life that is in it," said Faber.

"Of course; that is a mere truism," returned Wingfold, "equivalent to,
It lives in virtue of life. There is nothing _spontaneous_ in that. Its
life must in some way spring from the true, the original, the
self-existent life."

"There you are begging the whole question," objected the doctor.

"No; not the whole," persisted the curate; "for I fancy you will
yourself admit there is some blind driving law behind the phenomenon.
But now I will beg the whole question, if you like to say so, for the
sake of a bit of purely metaphysical argument: the law of life behind,
if it be spontaneously existent, can not be a blind, deaf, unconscious
law; if it be unconscious of itself, it can not be spontaneous; whatever
is of itself must be God, and the source of all non-spontaneous, that
is, all other existence."

"Then it has been only a dispute about a word?" said Faber.

"Yes, but a word involving a tremendous question," answered Wingfold.

"Which I give up altogether," said the doctor, "asserting that there is
_nothing_ spontaneous, in the sense you give the word--the original
sense I admit. From all eternity a blind, unconscious law has been at
work, producing."

"I say, an awful living