nothing, whether a Being distinct from this substance and these forces has created them, as a man of science I do not know, and it does not interest me; whoever is interested in it—and who is not ?-may seek elsewhere the answer to these questions; he may seek it from philosophy, and if this does not suffice, from theology.

When Burmeister1 says, "The earth and the world are eternal, for this quality is part of the essence of matter,” or, “That which has neither beginning nor end is eternal, and matter is said neither to have beginning nor end;" or when Hæckel' asserts that the proposition, "All matter is eternal," is "one of the first and highest laws of nature," and is besides "one which is generally acknowledged," you must not take these for the statements of natural science because they are pronounced by scientific men. 8 It is said that "chemistry teaches that no substance can perish or be destroyed, and that none can come into existence, and physics teaches us that no force perishes and that none comes into existence; the existing quantity of matter and force cannot be increased or diminished in the smallest degree by any event," and this may be true of the chemical and physical processes in the present condition of things; but it does not even follow from this that the present condition of things may not be altered or destroyed in the future by an external force, and still less may we conclude that it could not have had a beginning. It may be added, "The laws of thought

1 Geolog. Bilder, i. 243, 60.

2 Generelle Morphologie, i. 171.

3 Fr. Mohr, Geschichte der Erde, Bonn 1866, p. 5; Hæckel, Nat. Schöpfungsgesch. p. 8.

require that that which cannot be destroyed in time cannot either have originated in time;" but this, as is shown by the appeal to the "Laws of Thought," is a philosophical not a scientific conclusion; further, it is philosophically false, and violates the laws of thought. At all events the refutation of such statements, which are not scientific but philosophical, or rather unphilosophical and opposed to the idea of creation, does not form part of my task.

Those savants who know the problems and limits of their science have expressed in the most decided manner their conviction that these questions as to the origin of things do not belong to natural science. "It cannot be the object of geology," says G. Bischof, "to go farther back than to the original condition of the world during the period of the creation. Geology takes the earth as existing, without troubling itself as to how it came into existence. It is satisfied if it can discover whether the earth was originally a fiery or a fluid ball.”1 "Cosmogony," says Humboldt, "assumes the existence of all the matter now dispersed throughout the universe, and occupies itself only with the manifold conditions which this matter has undergone before it attained its present form and combination. All that lies outside this belongs to the province of philosophizing reason,' "2 rather let us say to that of other sciences. "We follow matter," says O. Fraas, "from the moment of its appearance in space and time, through all its formation and change, and we never lose it again in the great cycle of the earth's

1 Lehrb. der chem. u. phys. Geologie, 1st ed. i. 3.

2 In Moll's Jahrb. der Berg. und Hüttenkunde, iii. 6 (Tholuck's Lit. Anz., 1833, 537).

existence, during which it changes its shape and form thousands of times, but never perishes. Geology requires only the bodies of the planets, that is Archimedes' fixed point, from which it can begin its work. As to the first beginning of things, it can say no more and certainly nothing better than what every one has known long since: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."1

The newest discoveries of natural science have not shaken the doctrine that all things were created by God, nor have they rendered its philosophical or theological confirmation more difficult. On the contrary, many esteemed philosophical writers of the present day, Hermann Ulrici, S. C. Cornelius, Johannes Huber, Zürgen Bona Meyer, and others, have proved that modern natural science is far from playing into the hands of pantheism, materialism, and atheism; it rather leads in results as in its principles to the exactly opposite idea, to the recognition of a creative author of nature.2

1 Vor der Sündfluth, p. 8.

⚫ Ulrici, Gott und die Natur; Cornelius, Ueber die Entstehung der Welt ; Huber, Die Lehre Darwins, p. 184; Meyer, Philosophische Zeitfragen, p. 15; cf. A. Fick, Die Naturkräfte in ihrer Wechselbeziehung, Würzburg, 1869, p. 70; Pfaff, Schöpfungsgeschichte, 2nd ed. p. 131; Pfaff, Entstehung der Welt, 1876; Schaarschmidt, Der Atheismus, 1879. "Too commonly it is supposed, or taken for granted, that in proportion as it is in our power to trace things to their causes, to connect them one with the other, to systematize them, to tabulate them in geometrical and average conditions and proportions, so much the more we are removed from the necessity of admitting a higher and more final cause. One has often heard or read such reasoning as this: 'We can account for this phenomenon, we know the laws by which it is regulated, and we need not have recourse to the interference of a higher power, because it is in connection with the whole system of the universe, and could not be altered without in some way deranging other portions.' Consequently by every new discovery which brings before us the more immediate or the more remote cause of anything, it is supposed that we are departing a step more from the necessity of admitting the great and final cause. Then, consequently, the

We need not therefore come to any agreement with natural science concerning the origin of the visible world, but only concerning the development of that which God created. But before I turn to this, let me remind you of the full significance of the Christian dogma, God has created the world; it will avoid all possible misunderstanding in our future examination of the natural sciences. When we declare our belief that God is the creator of the world, and, as has been said, we may hold this belief without even coming into contact with natural science, we are not thinking of the God of pantheism, who does not exist apart from the world, but

mind begins to be involved more and more in its own speculations and thoughts, comes to look at its own conclusions as final, and almost to think that there is a sort of greatness in not taking the old short road of at once inviting God to take part in the phenomena of nature, or of going through a very few steps to find Him as the ultimate cause; but rather it seeks to spin a network of causes, which shall be so interwoven one with another that we can easily escape, when hard pressed, by following some divergences of science, and so being satisfied with those immediate causes which conceal from us the remote and final one. It would really appear that common reasoning should take us exactly in the opposite direction. If one discovered on the ground a ring, or a piece of metal, which had been twisted into a circular form, he might exclaim, What can this be? He looks at it, examines it, and perhaps concludes and says, it may have been formed by some accident and have fallen there. But if he take it up, and find that to it is attached another made in a similar manner, and that both are connected together, would our natural reason say that this was a stronger evidence of chance; or, on the contrary, would it not suggest that this proved it the more to be the work of the hand of an artificer? And if, bringing it still nearer, he found attached another link, and another, and another, and others going from them in different directions, and saw in all the same exactness of workmanship, the same symmetry of proportion, the same perfect finish, would every step thus made in observation suggest the idea that more and more we should conclude all this only to arise from a fortuitous combination of different chance productions, and not rather that there was an invisible hand here at work which alone could have produced this beautiful complication?"-Sermons, Lectures, and Speeches, etc., Wiseman, p. 252; cf. Deutinger, Renan und das Wunder, p. 92.

who is in the world, in the laws of nature, and in the spirit of man, so that He has no being except in these. Nor are we thinking of the God of deism, who merely exists apart from the world, who has no doubt created it as well as the laws of nature, but from that moment has left the world to itself and to the working of these laws without being able in any way to interfere with its course. Theism stands exactly between pantheism and deism, and finds its clearest and most perfect expression in the Christian doctrine of God. In a word, we believe in a God who lives and governs, He is the most perfect Being, exempt from all the imperfections which belong to the creature, endowed with all the perfections which it is possible to possess. He exists from eternity and through Himself alone, depending in His essence and action on no other being, limited by nothing which exists beside Himself. He is a personal Being, endowed with intelligence and will, but with an infinite intelligence, and a will that only wills what accords with His perfectness, and He can realize what He wills, so that His power is only bounded by His volition. He is of necessity eternal, but beside Him nothing need of necessity exist. He is selfsufficing, and all-blessed in Himself, and needs no other being existing but Himself. That other beings do exist, is in consequence of an act of His freewill. There was no necessity for creation apart from Him, for there is nothing apart from Him save through Him; nor were there such necessity in Himself, for from eternity He was self-sufficing. He could have not created, and as He did create through a free act of His will, He might have created differently, a differently

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