The ancient question as to which is first, the egg or the bird, is answered, if the egg produces the parent. But we cannot stop here. Another question follows: Who or what produces the parent of the egg?
That earth was hatched from the egg of Night was once an accepted theory. Heathen philosophy, modern geology, and all other material hypotheses, deal with causation as contingent on matter, and as necessarily apparent to the material senses, even where the proof requisite to sustain this assumption is undiscovered. Mortal theories make friends of sin, sickness, and death; whereas the spiritual facts of being include neither one of this triad.
Human experience in mortal life, starting from an egg, corresponds with that of Job, when he says, “Man is of few days and full of trouble.” Mortals must emerge from this notion of material life as all-in-all. They must peck their shells open with Science, and look upward. From a material source flows no remedy for sorrow, sin, and death; for the redeeming power, from the ills they occasion, is not in egg or dust.
Thought, loosened from a material basis, but not yet instructed by Science, becomes wild with freedom and is self-contradictory. The blending tints of leaf and flower show the order of matter to be the order of mortal mind. The intermixture of different species, urged to its utmost limits, results in a return to the original species. Thus it is learned that matter is a manifestation of mortal mind, and that it always gives up its claim when the perfect and eternal Mind appears.
Professor Agassiz gives the origin of mortal and material existence in the various forms of embryology, and
