questioning the power of faith or the power of prayer. It is a tenable proposition that they are the most tremendous power in the world; and yet we may hold that they take effect through the natural law alone, and have come into existence through the courses of evolution—or, if you like to put it so—in a faithful following of the Will which, in the act of Creation, made a compact and kept it.
But if the compact of Creation was not kept, if that impact of spirit upon matter (which through such vast eras and through such innumerable phases of life worked by cause and effect) was ever tampered with so that cause and effect were suspended, then the whole process becomes discredited to our moral sense, and its presiding genius is discredited also.
Are we to suppose that through the earlier millions of years, when only the elementary forms of life were present upon this globe, cause and effect went on unsuspended and unhindered, and that these processes, having once been started (engendered, let us assume, by the Immanent Will), held absolute sway over the development of life for millions and millions of years, until a time came when humanity appeared, and the idea of religion and a Deity entered the world; and that this process then became subject to a dethronement? Are we to believe that then intervention in a new form, and upon a different basis (not of cause and effect) began to take place? If that is the proposition, then, it seems to me, we are
