Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. THE GOD OF EVOLUTION. The manifestation of the life and power of the universe has been a gradual evolution ; that is, a continuous unfolding, a growing revelation, the less becoming more, the simple becoming complex, through an apparently infinite development and specialization. The whole is recapitulated in every flower that blooms. The rose is first a seed ; it pushes up through the soil, then branches, sends out bud and leaf, bursts into beauty and fragrance of flower, and then develops "from its loveliness the germ of something more to come. So of the mountain-pine, that has stood on its watch-tower overlooking whole centuries of human history. Its potential life was once wrapped up in one little seed, sheltered in the protecting grasp of a tiny cone that one might hold in his hand. The might and the marvel of this life are not to be seen by simply looking at seed or cone, but by studying the processes and results of the wondrous unfolding, or evolution. The universe, so far as at present we are able to trace, iras once contained in the world-seed of the fire-mist, orprimitive nebula. We might guess all sorts of things, as to where the fire-mist came from, and how it came : but science means knowledge ; and it is my purpose, so far as possible, to keep myself strictly to what is known. Theology assumes God, and thinks thus to escape all difficulties. But should science take to assuming, it has the same right to declare that the fire-mist made itself, or that it always existed, as theology has to say that God made himself, or always existed. I am willing frankly to admit that it is just as easy to think that the universe always existed, or that it made itself, as it is to think that God always existed, or made himself. It is simply impossible to imagine or compreh...