Take the mechanical view: Physical science asserts, "Nature does not allow us for a moment to doubt that we have to do with a rigid chain of cause and effect, admitting of no exceptions." Enlarge this statement: The theory of gravitation demonstrates that the hosts of Heaven are parts of a vast mechanism, and that the phenomena of Nature are expressible in terms of matter and motion, resolvable into the attractions and repulsions of material particles. On these principles of materialism, our mind, if sufficiently expanded, would be able to follow natural processes from beginning to end. It could see the molecules taking their position, by mutual specific attractions and repulsions, the whole process being the play and result of molecular force. Given a grain of wheat, an acorn, an infant, and their environment, expanded human intellect could trace out, à priori, every step of the process of growth; and, matter being given, we could, by the application of purely mechanical principles, fashion and furnish a world. Well, suppose we admit it all, which we do not, what then? Even on these principles, "we are obliged to regard every phenomenon as a manifestation of some Power by which we are acted upon; though Omnipresence is unthinkable, yet as experience discloses no bounds to the diffusion of phenomena, we are unable to think of limits to the presence of this Power." Hence, the nature of things, their mechanical adjustment, leads to the conception of an Omnipresent Energy.

If it be said "Everything that comes into Nature, or is in nature, or goes out of nature, is part of nature, or natural" -that, meaning the within and the without, includes the supernatural; and concedes the argument by confessing that something not in nature may come in, remain in, or go out. That nature arises out of, is sustained by, is interpenetrated in every part, and passes into the supernatural, is capable of proof. Every organism, whether animal or plant, possesses, besides the obviously useful arrangements of its organisation, other arrangements, the purpose of which it is utterly impossible to find out. Morphologists look upon the forms of animals and plants as something which cannot at all be 1" First Principles :" Herbert Spencer.

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explained mechanically. Attempted explanations, by means of descent and modification, rest, for all their power and meaning, on a deep and far-reaching law, at present unknown. Go yet lower: the origin of every simple salt crystal, obtained by evaporating its mother liquid, is no less mysterious as to its first cause, and no less incomprehensible in itself than the most complex animal. When gold and silver crystallize in a cubical, bismuth and antimony in a hexagonal, iodine and sulphur in a rhombic form of crystal, the ultimate cause is in every case hidden from us. Resolve all the appearances, properties, and movements of things into manifestations of energy within space and time, then energy, space, time, pass all understanding. Even materially and mechanically regarded, our own beginning is unexplainable and full of mystery. The germ, in and with which we began to exist, was, like every other germ, without any discoverable difference; but, in the process of development, it acquired the differential characteristics of the sub-kingdoms; then successively the characteristics of its class, order, family, genus, species, race. Come to our own identity or personality, that of which every one is conscious, the most certain of all facts, even this is a thing which cannot truly be known-knowledge of it is forbidden by the very nature of thought. It is unwise, therefore, for atheistic physicists to try to erect so elaborate an argument, and such universal denial, on absolute nescience. They cease to be guides when they forsake their own line of things. If, knowing that matter and thought, even in their simplest elements, are incomprehensible-both ends being beyond mental grasp—they speak as if things were in their grasp and fully known, they are deceivers. A mechanical process does not explain all things; every explanation eventually leads to the inexplicable; the deepest truth that we can get at rests upon something which is infinitely beyond.

It is quite true, in one sense, physical science knows, or is destined to know everything, but, in another sense, it knows nothing. Ask the materialist, Whence came matter and energy? Who or what formed molecules? Who or what made them run into organic forms? He has no answer. "His mind may be compared to a musical instrument with a certain

1

range of notes, beyond which, in both directions, we have an infinitude of silence." The same fact is put in other words,"After all, what do we know of this terrible 'matter,' except as a name for the unknown and hypothetical states of our own consciousness."2 We neither know nor can know anything of matter, save through the medium of our senses, and these senses rest upon our intellect, so that we only know matter by mind-the visible by the invisible. "The sciences have in this respect one common aim, to establish the supremacy of intelligence over the world; "3 not the supremacy of the world over intelligence. Hence, so far from matter being the only thing we can know amongst the many unknown, and the only certainty amongst those which must for ever remain uncertain, it is, if not inferior in certainty, surely subordinate to that greater truth-the existence of mind. Whoever knows that matter and all its forms are shown to be the more marvellous, the more they are investigated, and, in their ultimate natures, absolutely incomprehensible, will know also that the attempted interpretation of all phenomena in terms of matter, motion, energy, is not merely an erroneous reduction of our complex symbols of thought to physical symbols, but an endeavour to explain our consciousness, or mental phenomena, by the matter and material phenomena of which we are conscious; as if a disquisition on a flower would explain the hand that grasps, the eye that sees, the intelligence that discerns. It is a presumptuous, ignorant attempt to bridge over that chasm between consciousness and physics, which must ever remain intellectually impassable.

It must strike even the most careless who realise the supremacy of mind that God, being the Creator of all things, the all things must include matter. (Col. i. 16.) The Bible does not tie us down to the fact that God did absolutely create matter; but we, believing that He did, that He brought it out of the invisible, seek to justify and verify our faith, for every advance in our knowledge of the natural world will, if

"Matter and Force :" Prof. Tyndall.

2 "The Physical Basis of Life :" Prof. Huxley.

3 "On the Relation of Natural Science to General Science : Prof. Helmholtz.

Existence of Matter.

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directed by the spirit of true humility, and with a prayer for God's blessing, advance us in our knowledge of God, and prepare us to receive the revelation of His will with profounder reverence." With reverence, therefore, we ask, nor can we help asking, "Whence, and to what end is this matter?" In the first page of Scripture, matter and spirit are placed in essential opposition. The space between the two is, indeed, no yawning gulf, but spanned by creative will when the visible comes forth from the invisible. Matter is substance in the lowest form, which every act of the Divine Spirit brings nearer to the final glorification.

We are told, however, that "the creation of matter is unthinkable, even as the annihilation of matter is unthinkable;" "there is neither more nor less matter in the universe now than there was in the beginning;" in fact, "as to matter, there cannot have been any beginning as there cannot be any ending." These assertions are nothing more than hypotheses. In the first place, that which is unthinkable cannot be so thought out as to become an unquestionable proposition of the highest certainty. In the second place, the capacity or incapacity of the human mind cannot, in any sense, measure or set boundaries to Divine action. In the third place, the existence of matter is as inconceivable as its non-existence; we only know of matter by energy, and of energy by consciousness, and of consciousness as a sign of the Unknown behind it. This Unknown makes our consciousness aware that it is abstractedly possible for energy to compress matter to such an extent as to be without limit; and thus, as the space occupied is indefinitely decreased, and the space unoccupied indefinitely increased, even though we may not be able to conceive matter reduced to nothing, we can and do get an approximate conception; and we get no more than an approximate conception even of those things which we pretend to know fully. To say that creation of matter out of nothing is unthinkable is merely this-that we don't know how to do it, nor how anyone else can do it.

Matter is in the world, and the pious mind conceives it came there because the Supreme Mind so willed. Socrates 1 Sir Robert Inglis, British Association, 1847.

said that he was in prison of his own will awaiting death, but his muscles and bones of their own will would have gone off to Megara or to Boeotia,-"By the dog of Egypt they would, if they had been guided by their own ideas, and if I had not chosen as the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant and running away, to undergo any punishment which the State inflicts." The mind of Socrates willed his body into the prison-house. Divine energy brought matter into existence to be, in its manifold shapes, the visible outer-works of an invisible universe.

Transitions and transformations from these two worlds are constantly in progress. The ultimate particles of matter are, therefore, permeable and permeated by the invisible and immaterial, so that the material world points to that certainty towards which all intelligence tends, and we arrive at the fact-long declared by Scripture and now proclaimed by science that through all agencies works the Unknown Cause.

Natural phenomena are consequently physical signals of an ever-present energy, and afford analogies whereby we rise to the conception, at least in some degree, of existences absolutely immaterial and spiritual. It may be asserted, "We cannot argue from one state to the other," nevertheless, the connection between mind and matter is intimate, and our consciousness of identity, linking the invisible with the visible, the past with the present, forms a sound basis for argument. We are unable to attain the principle containing in itself, but not identical with all the various complicated conditions which evolve the seen from the unseen; but may represent them, not by that simplicity of motion once. considered to be possessed by the planets in their repeated circular motion, but by those now known curves of complicity wherein all the various motions are contained, consequent on the unsymmetrical distribution of forces around the planetary bodies. As a matter of fact, we are acquainted in the visible world with the transfer of one grade of being to another, can conceive of a translation from some other state to this, from this to some state connected with it. We can imagine the change of visible or invisible energy into heat, some potential,

1 "Plato:" Dr Jowett's Translation.