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whole difficulty, enable us to believe that what is unexplained will hereafter afford wonderful views of the power and love of God. In the study on the Pre-Adamite world the moral aspect is viewed; now take chiefly the physical.

Evil, as a fact, does not belong simply to theology. Atheism, in trying to get rid of it by a shift to chance or to fate, ascribing both good and evil to unintelligent causes, neither accounts for the vast preponderance of good nor alleviates the evil. That a mixed state of things is temporally necessitated by the physical constitution of the universe is certain. The earth has ever been a scene of warfare. Fossil structures, in common with the structures of existing animals, present elaborate weapons of destruction. There has been a perpetual preying of the superior on the inferior—a ceaseless devouring of the weak by the strong; and animals were so designed as to render bloodshed necessary. In innumerable cases the suffering inflicted seems to bring no compensating benefit; the inferior destroys the superior, and there are elaborate appliances for securing the welfare of organisms, incapable even of feeling, at the expense of misery to organisms susceptible of high happiness. Of the animal kingdom, half are parasites. Every known animal has its own species, and generally more than one. The Bothriocephalus latus and the Taenia solium are two kinds of tape-worm which flourish in the human intestines, cause horrible distress, sometimes ending in insanity. From the germs of the Tonia, carried into other parts of the body, arise partially developed forms known as Cysticerci, Echinocci, and Conuri, which cause pain and disease in the brain, the lungs, the liver, the heart, the eye, and other parts, often ending in death. Five other parasites of a different class are found in the human viscera. Another class of Entozoa, of the sub-division Trematoda, exists, of five kinds, attacking the liver, the gall-ducts, the portal vein, the intestine, the bladder, the eye. There is the Trichina spiralis in one phase of existence embedded in the muscles, and thence passing into the intestines. As to the external parasites, or Epizoa, there are creatures that bury themselves in the skin, and there lay eggs; others infest the surface of the body, and parasites are on every plant. Thus man, animal, plant, are

infested, and endure great suffering, even unto death. These details prove that pain and sorrow are not partial nor accidental, but wide-spreading as life, and wrought into the very nature of things.

Is it possible to extract good out of this evil? Try. In the lowest grades of existence are creatures wholly inert; their life is diffused, without central being, may be called external; yet, even in these, is a conflict of forces. Amongst them are living things with life and motion clearly manifest. Higher in the scale are organisms with members of greater variety and complexity, every one fitted to function; but life and activity are not at their best until some obstacle has to be surmounted, some difficulty to be overcome. Then action and reaction, the taking this, refusing that, the operation of will, come in; so that obstacles, difficulties, evil, are not something arbitrary, altogether hurtful, but the natural accompaniments of a limited condition-spurs exciting to defence and enlargement of the sphere of activity. Existence, notwithstanding this conflict, is better than non-existence; a plant excels a stone, an animal is superior to a plant, and of all animals man is best. Physical evils are undoubtedly among the elements of progress, urging toward relative perfection of life; the struggle to escape from the evil giving more energy, and leading to amelioration, to the casting off those peculiarities or infirmities which tend to nourish evil-parasitic life.

If a course of action is pursued, whch tends to throw anything out of balance, and so detract from physical or moral completeness of life, such departure from completeness, goodness, truth, is evil; and brings more or less of misery. Whether or not spiritual evil can poison the root of things, and cause degeneration and misery in lower forms of life, science cannot tell; but we may regard the moral sense of man as an analogue to the sense of pain shared, in some degree, by all conscious beings; even as spiritual improvement and physical betterment are both to be regarded as tokens of a perfection yet to be attained.

Thus viewed, evil is a temporary incident attendant on the growing supremacy and multiplication of the best. The beneficence of pain is seen as an incentive to action, to con

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The questions below do not touch the insintable problem of evil! Evil is Temporary.?

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sciousness, use and development of powers, enforcing obedience to law as the requirement and condition of a happy life. When men assert the existence of evil to be inconsistent with the personality or with the goodness of God, they really demand a universe absolutely perfect from the beginning. Would such a universe mirror forth Divine power, wisdom, goodness? Free responsible beings are the highest created existences amongst these, evil, sometime or other, is sure to arise; and extend, by their agency, to physical things. Are free spirits never to spring into life, lest evil drag them away? Must life be denied to infinite numbers of happy beings, delighting themselves in Divine Goodness, because the mysterious gift of freedom may be abused? Would not this elevate evil into a power restraining even Godhead, and ly under the world a vast expanse of stagnation, without life, growth, progress? Are not onward movements essential to the happiness of finite beings? and can we form any idea of × life, growth, progress, without conflict, i.e., without evil? The onward march of the universe through evil to perfection—a perfection never absolutely reached because infinite, is a higher conception of Divine working than the idea of a machine complete in all its parts, but incapable of development and progress. Those who think most profoundly on those deep things of God, believe that they fit into a vast design of wisdom and mercy, the full understanding of which must necessarily be deferred to a future further advance towards perfection. Scientific men will admit that millions of years are as nothing in the life of the universe; and if, in the brief period of human history, we can trace a gradual though slow abatement of moral and physical evils, all analogy leads us to extend that fact to the universe; and confirms the Revelation of the written Word that all things are in the hand of a mighty, wise, and loving Ruler-are moving through evil and by evil to more perfect good.

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* But why mens they move to end"? to answer is possible:

STUDY VI.

THE CREATIVE WORDS.

Gen. i., ii. 3.

"Speaking is the revelation of thought: Creation is the realization of Divine thought."-Keil and Delitzsch, Pentateuch.

WE pass now from purely scientific arguments to the Record of Creation in Holy Scripture. This portion of our subject demands expository treatment, and will lead to some of those transcendental, yet most practical truths which the Gospel Revelation proclaims. Our main object is to harmonize the Scriptural Record with the true conclusions of science.

Science confesses that the world is inexplicable without "the omnipresent existence (ignored by positivism), whereof the phenomenal world is the multiform manifestation." Our previous studies show that there have been breaks of continuity in the visible universe which must have been bridged from an external source-"all portions of our science, and especially that beautiful one, the Dissipation of Energy, point unanimously to a beginning, to a state of things incapable of being derived by present laws (of tangible matter and its energy) from any conceivable previous arrangement. This fact science, whose province is the discoverable, has revealed; what saith Scripture?

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"In the beginning," ; "of old;" ¿vάpx?, LXX; am Anfang, Luther; is to be taken as the head of all time, preceding every kind of existence-that commencement of Divine history when the ideal, fundamental, and eternal plan of God began to be realised in creation. Thus, the Bible in its first Hebrew word states a fact which it is now the glory of physical science to affirm. The earth and all things

1 "Cosmic Philosophy," Pref., p. x.: John Fiske.

2 "Recent Advances in Physical Science," p. 26: P. G. Tait, M.A.

Creation Began Time.

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therein, the heavens and all their host, "are phenomena the very nature of which demonstrates that they must have had a beginning, and that they must have an end." There is no parallax by which to calculate the precise time, and there is no older event, for in the generation of the Son of God (Jno. i. 1-3) the same word is used to show that Christ is co-eternal with the Father. Not that Christ had a beginning, but in the beginning, being God and with God, He acted as the Creative Power.

As Creation was in the beginning, and began time, there never was a time without Creation. In carrying up the mind to a conception of the age of our own earth and planetary system, it must be remembered that physical statements, like those in study on "the Rudiments of the World," p. 76-80, are made, and rightly, on the ground of our belief as to the progressive order and continuance of things. It is not necessary as theologians, as physicists, or as geologists, so far as faith in God and Holy Scripture are concerned, to accept those calculations which assign great antiquity to our own world. Reckoned backwards-on scientific principles of progression from the past, and forwards-according to the doctrine of continuance,-they are affirmed by science not as absolute but highly probable facts. It was possible for God to have acted in any other way and by quicker process; and He may, as to the future, change all things in a moment; but, while chastened in mind by Scripture and preserved from secularism, we endeavour to use science as a light to the meaning of sacred physical statements that enlightened intellect and pious emotion may be alike content.

Create, is the proper word to denote Divine production. Our faith pierces the phenomenal externality of the world to its supernatural and essential source, and has power to understand that the worlds were framed (Heb. xi. 3). Fuerst states, in his Concordance, that create has not essentially the meaning of making things out of nothing: “No7, non habet producendi ex nihilo vim." The LXX version is émóincev ó deós sòv oùpævòv zai shu yýv.” create, ny make, y form, interchange in use; for example, create and make 1 "Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge," Prof. Huxley.

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