he calls an act of philosophic faith, that it once was So. Of course no one can hinder Professor Huxley from cherishing such a belief; we have simply to point out that in doing so he is departing from the principle of science to the faith in miracle. He is admitting that what is now a law of nature, and a law which according to Sir William Thomson is as firmly established as that of gravitation, existed originally as the violation of another, an earlier and an opposite law. If Professor Huxley could transform his philosophic faith into a scientific certainty, he would thereby destroy at a stroke the whole fabric of evolution which he has so patiently reared, and would break that chain of continuity which he loves to find in all things. Meantime we are not concerned with his faith but with his science, and his science is confessedly on the side of Sir William Thomson. He admits that the course of nature as we now have it, is a course in which the living can only spring from the living; and he is therefore an enemy to the doctrine that spontaneous generation exists as a fact of experience.

We may take it, then, as one of the most sure positions of modern science, that, in the system of nature as now constituted, life can only proceed from life. But let us understand distinctly what is involved in this position; it means nothing less than this, that life is eternal. If no life could ever exist except as the product of a life which existed

before it, there follows the inevitable conclusion that life never began to be; that in point of fact it has already proved the immortality of its nature by a duration from infinite ages. In endeavouring to realise this thought there are two courses open to us. We may either say that there has been an eternal series of children and fathers through which life has propagated itself from the depths of the infinite past, or we may stop short in the recognition of one great central Life, which has been the primal parent of all other lives, and which itself has had no beginning. The former, if held exclusively, would be an atheistic position; the latter would be the affirmation of theism. But what we wish at present to point out is the fact that, whichever of these views we adopt, we are landed in the same conclusion as to life's essential immortality. Whether we think of it as having been propagated through an endless series of ancestors, or whether we conceive it as having been originally centred in the being of a divine intelligence whose goings forth have been of old for ever, we are led in either case to the same result so far as the present question is concerned-the recognition of an essence whose existence has been everlasting, whose nature has been immortal, whose beginning has been nowhere.

We have said that there are open to us these two modes of conceiving the eternity of life. We

M

shall speedily find, however, that one of them will require to be relinquished. At first sight the alternatives might seem to be equally plausible. It might appear to be just as easy to hold that life has been eternally propagated from parent to offspring, as to believe that there exists a great primal Life, which is itself without father or mother or descent. The alternatives are no doubt equally mysterious. In truth, however, modern science soon compels us to acknowledge that, leaving mystery out of the question, the first of them must be given up as untenable. If life can only spring from life, it is indeed certain that vitality can have no beginning, but it is not less certain that in this world it had a beginning. The further back we go, we find the forms of life more simple and the quantity of life more limited, clearly showing that this earth of ours does not possess a boundless supply of the vital element. And even if we could adopt the theory of Sir William Thomson, which supposes that originally the vital spark was carried to our world in a meteor, we should thereby only postpone, and not avoid, the necessity to arrest the movement of the infinite regress. For as Professor Huxley has truly pointed out, no form of life as we know it could possibly have existed during the gaseous period. It is beyond all question that there existed a time in which physical vitality was impossible; and therefore it is beyond all question

that, so far as the visible universe is concerned, there must have existed a time in which life began to be.

There are accordingly two conclusions to which we are constrained to come. On the one hand we find that life has been eternal; on the other hand we perceive that the physical forms of life have not been eternal, but had a definite beginning in time. Each of these conclusions inevitably results from our acceptance of the positions of modern science, and in order to deny either of them we should require to deny these positions. Modern science tells us that the law of the physical world in which we live is the law of biogenesis-in other words, the principle that life can only spring from life; unless we deny that this law has itself been eternal, we shall be forced on the strength of it to admit the eternity of life. Modern science tells us, on the other hand, that the physical forms of life as we know them have been developed from the small to the great and from the great to the greatest, clearly pointing to the fact that they had a beginning in time. Unless we deny the accuracy of these observations, we shall be equally forced to admit that the forms of life as we know them have not been eternal.

It is clear, then, that at one time the eternal life must have been brought into such contact with the physical forms of this universe as to produce a physical or temporal life; the phenomena of physi

cal vitality must have had their beginning in the impartation to material forms of a portion of that central Life which had no beginning. This is the only conclusion which is warranted by the facts of experience, and the only conclusion which will harmonise the seemingly contradictory aspects of nature; it is a conclusion also which, making allowance for differences in expression, will be as acceptable to the man of advanced science as to the votary of the ancient faith, for it lies at the very basis of Mr Spencer's own position. But now let us ask what appearance to the eye of a spectator would be produced by witnessing such an act as we have supposed. If the central Life of the universe should at a certain moment of time impart a portion of its being to one of the physical forms of nature, and if the eye of a spectator could be imagined to have witnessed the creative ceremony, what would he see? he would see only the appearance of a spontaneous generation. The central Life of the universe could not in itself be visible to him; he could only trace its presence by its effect, and in the present instance its effect would be limited to the impartation of life and movement to a form which hitherto had neither lived nor moved. We often think that we should have been highly privileged had we been permitted to witness the miracle of the creation of life; in truth the witnessing of that miracle would by no means have absolved us