some knowledge of His moral perfections also. In the study of Nature we must have a Person at the lower end of the scale, before that study can begin, and therefore the requirement of Dr Mozley is already satisfied. If there were only one person, one conscious intelligence capable of discerning moral truth, and recognizing a law of duty, this would be as sure a warrant for ascribing moral perfections to the author of that universe, as if there were a thousand such beings; but of course the larger the number of known beings, endowed with these higher attributes and faculties, and the more important the influence which these have exercised on the whole course of known physical change, and the actual state of the world in which we live, the stronger is the presumption for the prominence which moral truths, motives and aims may be expected to have from age to age in the whole scheme of universal being. That prominence, however, in the eye of reason must depend mainly on the essential dignity of moral truth, duty, and moral goodness in themselves, and only in a secondary degree on the number of individuals, within the range of our knowledge, who have this nobler and higher gift of moral being.

Let us next consider the further inferences which may be drawn from a contemplation of the wide range of living creatures, plants, and animals, exclusive of man or creatures endowed with reason, and voluntary choice as well as life. Here we must seek to abide in the clear daylight of conspicuous facts, and avoid losing ourselves in the mists and jungle of modern physiology and metaphysics. What foothold for reason or inference of any kind can we find in this vast range of the living universe, by starting from Mr Spencer's proposed definition of life?

"Life," he instructs us, "is a definite combination of heterogeneous changes, simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with external co-existences and sequences."

Every word here is either an ambiguity, an unexplained assumption, or a self-contradiction. First, life is a combination of changes; it is not the source or cause of changes, but those changes themselves; how many of these changes then are needed to satisfy the definition? Through how many changes must a living plant or animal have passed in order to be really alive? Again, of what are they to be the changes? Of some millions of atoms, which had pre-existed for countless ages before the birth of this living creature, and have been changing ever since through every moment of their existence? Next, life is said to be a "combination" of these changes. How is this possible? How can these changes combine at all, since any one state of this set of atoms must have ceased before the next comes into being? Life then it seems, is a combination of past, present, and future changes of countless atoms, all co-existing at the same moment, But if life is a combination of past, present, and future changes, who or what is to combine them? The theory and definition are framed to exclude the need of any reference to a Creator. The phrase itself, "persistence of force," instead of its preservation, is framed to avoid the risk of suggesting an idea foreign to this atheistic creed, of a Divine Preserver and Sustainer of all things. The definition further excludes the unity of a living plant or animal, distinct from the atoms that compose it. Do the changes combine themselves? The successive changes then must either all exist before they combine, or combine themselves before they exist. Or is the combination nothing more than the bare fact of the successive occurrence of these different states? What claim can such a series have to the title of combination? Life again is a "definite" combination of changes. By whom or what is this to be defined? What severs these special changes from an innumerable multitude of other changes

adjacent to them in place, and contemporaneous with them in time, which it is meant to exclude? The changes which are to constitute life, when they have been combined, without any combiner, and defined, in the entire absence of any power able to define them, are further said to be "simultaneous and successive." This can be no special character of vital changes, but must be true alike of the changes of all things, living and lifeless. The millions of atoms cannot fail to have simultaneous changes, since they all co-exist throughout their successive changes. Those changes cannot be "heterogeneous," or unlike in kind, unless we introduce surreptitiously that idea of definite kinds or species, which forms one of the plainest elements in the Bible account of creation, but which it is one main object of the modern theory of evolution wholly to exclude. Let us return from this morass of obscure verbiage, where our feet sink deeper and deeper in contradiction at every step, when we attempt to tread upon it, and contemplate the facts themselves.

A living plant or animal implies and requires a unit of some kind, associated with an organized system, composed of a vast multitude of material or ethereal atoms, in some special relation to that unit and to each other. The first question is, what is the characteristic feature of these various units, living plants and animals, as distinct from the multitude and manifoldness of the structures of material atoms with which they are associated? Vegetable and animal life, except in their lowest forms, have many features of contrast with each other, and in each class the varieties are almost innumerable; but in both, some kind or degree of spontaneity, or the power to originate certain changes at its own choice or pleasure, seems inseparable from the conception of life. The power of each living thing to originate changes

directly, is limited to its associate organism; indirectly through the changes of its own organism, it may produce changes in other living creatures and in the lifeless world around. The amount or range of power to effect change may vary immensely, from the animalcule, of which there are millions in a drop of water, to the elephant, the hippopotamus, the whale, or the mammoth. But a power of spontaneous motion seems as clearly revealed in the most minute, as in the most ponderous, and massive. Spontaneity then, or a power to vary the motions or positions of its own frame within certain limits, by an internal choice or preference, not determined from without, but depending on its own secret nature, seems to be the essential and defining feature of life in all living things. In plants, this character is more obscure. and less developed than in animals, yet we speak instinctively of a tree struggling towards the light, and of the sun-flower as turning to seek and meet the rays of the sun, and of the sensitive plant, as shrinking, by a kind of instinct, from any contact of foreign bodies. Spontaneity, or action not determined by mechanical laws, seems to be a main feature in the whole universe of life, from the animalcule, detected only by the microscope, up to man himself, the lord and head of the visible universe. It is thus a startling assertion of Prof. Tyndall, in the advocacy of his statement in the Belfast address, that "modern science has bound nature fast in the bonds of fate to an extent before unsuspected," that from Galileo and Newton to our own time, while eager eyes have been pondering the phenomena of the universe,

"Nothing has ever intimated that nature has been crossed by spontaneous action, or that a state of things at any time existed which could not be rigorously deduced from the preceding state."

One would have thought that to watch the sportive. flutterings of a single butterfly on a summer day amidst the flowers and trees, or the gambols of a kitten, when it coils itself up for rest on some favoured spot, or starts up suddenly into fresh and free activity of manifest enjoyment, would be enough to shew the utter baselessness of this statement. Life, in all its forms, is one vast range of activity, chequered and intersected by countless conditions and laws of a mechanical and purely material kind, but intertwined in every part, and through the whole range of being, with the elements of choice, freedom, spontaneity; and this vital action is determined in all its details by reasons and motives which are not mechanical, which indicate the internal preferences of conscious or semi-conscious existences, that is of things. that live and feel and choose. The range of choice in many of these creatures is almost infinitesimally small, but internal choice and preference, and activity depending upon it, seems almost inseparable from the very conception of a living creature. What then are the main inferences with regard to the Divine nature, which in the view of sound reason, result inevitably from the contemplation of the whole universe of living things? The general conclusion must be that the great First Cause possesses in the fullest measure, and to the greatest extent, every excellence which may be seen in any of His creatures, but free from the endless imperfections and limitations and negative characters by which those different creatures are distinguished from, and contrasted with, each other. We are bound then to ascribe to the First Cause, in our thoughts, the highest conceivable degree of spontaneity, or freedom from bondage to circumstances and physical determination from without, and a mode of activity as far removed as is possible or conceivable from dull, blind, unalterable, and fatal