Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith | Page 9

to cool just then? Fill it as full of electricity, magnetism and odyle as you please; do these afford any reason for its very extraordinary conduct? The utmost they do is to show you how such a change took place, but they neither tell you where the original matter came from, nor why its form was changed. Change is an effect, and every effect requires a cause. There could be no cause outside of the fire mist; for they say there was nothing else in the universe. Then the cause must be in the mist itself. Had it a mind, and a will, and a perception of propriety? Did the mist become sensible of the lightness of its behavior, and the fire resolve to cool off a little, and both consult together on the propriety of dropping their erratic blazing through infinite space, and resolve to settle down into orderly, well-behaved suns and planets? In the division of the property, what became of the mind? Did it go to the sun, or to the moon, or to the pole star, or to this earth? Or, was it clipped up into little pieces and divided among the stars in proportion to their respective magnitudes; so that the sun may have, say the hundredth part of an idea, and the moon a faint perception of it? Did the fire mist's mind die under this cruel clipping and dissecting process; or is it of the nature of a polypus, each piece alive and growing up to perfection in its own way? Has each of the planets and fixed stars a great "soul of the world" as well as this earth, and are they looking down intelligently and compassionately on the little globe of ours? Had we not better build altars to all the host of heaven and return to the religion of our acorn-fed ancestors, who burned their children alive, in honor of the sun, on Sun-days?
An aqueous solution of this difficulty of getting rid of Almighty God, is frequently proposed. It is known that certain chemical solutions, when mixed together, deposit a sediment, or precipitate, as chemists call it. And it is supposed that the universe was all once in a state of solution, in primeval oceans, and that the mingling of the waters of these oceans caused them to deposit the various salts and earths which form the worlds in the form of mud, which afterward hardened into rock, or vegetated into trees and men. Thus, it is clearly demonstrated that there is no need for the Creator if--if--if--we only had somebody to make these primeval oceans--and somebody to mix them together![3]
The development theory of the production of the human race from the mud, through the mushroom, the snail, the tortoise, the greyhound, the monkey and the man, which is now such a favorite with atheists, if it were fully proved to be a fact, would only increase the difficulty of getting rid of God. For either the primeval mud had all the germs of the future plants and monkeys, and men's bodies and souls, in itself originally, or it had not. If it had not, where did it get them? If it had all the life and intelligence in the universe in itself, it was a very extraordinary kind of God. We shall call it the mud-god. Our atheists then believe in a god of muddy body and intelligent mind. But if they deny intelligence to the mud, then we are back to our original difficulty, with a large appendix, viz: The paving stones made themselves first and all atheists afterward.
The whole theory of development is utterly false in its first principles. From the beginning of the world to the present day, no man has ever observed an instance of the spontaneous generation of life. There is no law of nature, whether electric, magnetic, odylic, or any other, which can produce a living plant or animal, save from the germ or seed of some previous plant or animal of the same species. Nor has a single instance of the transmutation of species ever been proved. Every beast, bird, fish, insect and plant brings forth after its kind, and has done so since its creation. No law of Natural Philosophy is more firmly established than this, That there is no spontaneous generation, nor transmutation of species. It is true there is a regular gradation of the various orders of animal and vegetable life, rising like the steps of a staircase, one above the other; but gradation is no more caused by transmutation than a staircase is made by an ambitious lower step changing itself into all the upper ones.
To refer the origin of the world to the laws of nature is absurd. Law, as Johnson defines it, is a rule of