painful effects or sensations are not necessarily inherent in matter as an antagonistic influence begotten and sustained by a father and offspring of evil principle or imponderable force, but that pain and sorrow appear to be inherent in all gestating life and growth; thus all conception is attended with sorrow, and that pain accompanies those conditions of life that exist dependent upon a maternal protection to modify or impede the otherwise overwhelming energy of omnipotent power. Omnipotence can only be finited and defined, or made divisional for phenomenal effects,- such as growing individuality exhibits, by the veil of protecting pain in divine parturition. The apostle Paul records his opinion, that the whole of nature groans and travails in this process of divine gestation, waiting for the consummation of that predestined period allotted for the birth of the sons of the eternal Father.

The same illustration was made use of by Jesus, who said that all the sons of God were destined to feel the painful effects of sorrow in mental sensations, analogous to the travail of a child-bearing woman when her allotted hour had arrived.

The hypothesis of the existence of evil as a power, force, or principle, absolute and unconditioned, warring against divine goodness, overlooks the first axiom that should be at the basis of true theism, viz., that of Deity's omnipotence. This, indeed, is admitted without scruple by Dr. Cumming, in his "Great Tribulation," pages 110 and 255, where he limits God's power by refusing to allow him ability to eradicate theological evil.

In a lecture upon the monogenesis of force, Professor Smee says:

"All force has a monogenetic origin, and when generated "a truly equivalent power."

But sacerdotalism of good and evil denies this axiom flatly, for it could have no fundamental antithesis to work upon for eternal reward and punishment, if all force when once generated had truly an equivalent power. How could a good parent beget evil? If this is denied, then there is

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no alternative for them but to controvert the promise, that all force has a monogenetic origin.

The gross absurdities which clergymen give utterance to when pursuing a train of theological investigation, may be instanced in the following Extract from "The Leisure "Hour," of 9th February, 1854, which sample of theistical philosophy is affiliated upon Dr. Hugh Mc Neile.

66

A STRIKING ILLUSTRATION. "Imagine one of our planets to have been flung out of its orbit beyond the reach "of the attraction of gravitation. It has no power of itself to "return to its orbit, and unless some extra power be exer"cised upon it, it becomes a wanderer in the immensity of 66 space, and must continue a wanderer for ever. Now man "has been flung by sin, through the fall, out of his moral "orbit, he is without the reach of the attraction of holy "love, there is no principle within him to restore him to

happy revolution round the sun of righteousness, and "unless some extra power be put forth, unless the breathings "of divine love follow and reach him, he is, and must be, a "wanderer for ever."

This is, indeed, "a striking illustration;" but it is of the most lamentable ignorance, or wilful perversion of the soundest and commonest axioms in natural philosophy. In this striking illustration of the peculiar effects of theological force, we are called upon to imagine a physical impossibility, viz., that of a planetary world flung out of its orbit, and requiring super or preter-natural power to restore it to existence. In something like this sapient style of absurd speculation, it has gravely been suggested that the asteroids are the remains of a large planetary body rent asunder by some theological catastrophe! When once the mind has surrendered itself to this sort of shambling meditation, there is no limit to the ludicrous misfitting of true logical relations.

The several hypotheses of attractive forces acting at a distance, or of stellar, planetary, and cometary orbital and elliptical revolutions in space, or of two atoms of matter being necessary to set up gravitation, are all loose and arbitrary assump

tions that confuse instead of clearing up difficult problems. These assertions, each and altogether, contribute to explain away or to ignore the positive and absolute omnipotence and conservation of one ever-present, ever-acting power or force of monogenetic origin, that is every where one and the same, that has on its positive and absolute side no bounds, limits, or conditions, but which has on its material, relative, or negative face, turned towards man, certain definite and calculable conditions that reveal phenomenally its existence, which conditions and definitions of existence it is man's privilege to study, and his happiness and health to obey.

Professor Faraday, in his lecture on the "Conservation of "Forces," argues that gravitation is properly one form only of one omnipresent force, that is present not only in all material atoms, but in all space, and he neither admits as his own conclusion, nor allows that Newton held, that gravitation strictly implies direct action at a distance. He says, that the hypothesis of gravitation, varying inversely with the square of material distances, is a definition of its action that gives but an imperfect account of the whole of that force, inasmuch as such a phenomenon can be only one exercise of that power, and that consequences or changes in condition must occur in gravitating bodies in proportion to the apparent increase of power developed in agglomeration of material atoms. He says further, that inertia of matter proves the axiom of the absolute conservation of force, remarking that he cannot believe that the totality of a force can be employed either in the mode assigned to gravitation, or in electrical or magnetic action; and observes, that if we do not see consistency between gravitation, magnetism, and electricity, it is because we are ignorant of them. In controverting the assumption that gravity depends upon two material atoms or aggregrates of atoms, and that one atom by itself will not gravitate, Faraday says:

:

"It is held that we cannot conceive the relation of a lone particle to gravitation according to present limited view of "that force. I can conceive its relation to something which "causes gravitation, and with which, whether this particle

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" of matter is alone, or one of a universe of other particles, "it is always related."

It seems now to be a growing conviction, that the hypothesis of gravitation being the action of aggregates of material atoms, at a distance, is untenable, unless such can be proved to be, like Sir Boyle Roach's celebrated bird in two places at once, ex. gr. the sun cannot be, per se, the actual cause of planetary orbital motions, for no body can act upon another where it does not exist. It must be that each planetary aggregate of atoms moves by the propulsion or compulsion of one omnipresent ever acting force, which is intimately and indissolubly related by the most complete of all unions that can be conceived to each atom.

Power, force, causation, call it what we may, is and must necessarily be omnipresent, there can be no such thing as interstellar voids, there cannot be a purely void space; aggregates of material atoms are sustained in motion by a current that is not material like a fluid, because fluid presses with equal force in every direction.

The interstellar spaces are not voids, for they are occupied by an omnipresent existence that is incessantly in motion, but is hidden from human perception in its foetal condition of existence; and there is no revelation of this great ever present entity, except where in exceptional modes of its being, a sort of saturation point is attained, serving, through such definite and infinitesimal point, to afford negatively a glimpse of the vast ocean of positive light that exists behind it.

There cannot be two forces in existence, since all force has a monogenetic origin. The negative of electrical action, is one face of the same flux that the positive is higher and enveloping side of, and material atoms are the Leyden jars that separate the current of force into positive and negative. relations.

Every form of force known to man is definite, both in amount and disposition; and every modification of the form and disposition of force, is connected with changes in the molecular structure of material aggregates. Each new dis

position of force implies an actual change in the relative disposition of material atoms. There is no action without this subtle mutation of atoms of matter, and no change of material particles without this action. Incessant mutation is at the very foundation of all conditions of material existence, and the phenomena of such change is all that mind cognises of the existence of force, and it is to no purpose that man appeals to his consciousness of what he calls intelligent causation, to prove the homogeneousness of his mind with that of the unknown generator of phenomenal existences. The logical result of this hypothesis of intelligent causation is the reduction of Deity's omnipotence to limited and definite, though superhuman mental attributes.

All force, since its impregnation of material ova or atoms, has essentially a timed or phenomenal aspect. The absolute or positive is the unknown side of one force that matter reveals, and the negative and relative is that side of the same power that is presented to human view. Without a material personation there can be no revelation of any existence, and all known power come through this incarnation; but while all that man knows, or can know, is directly derived from material concepts, they serve as a veil to hide what is not for man to know until he is in a higher condition or mode of that one mighty existence of which he is now only faintly

conscious.

The earth is illuminated in common with the other planets by solar light, but the sun is not itself the absolute cause of light, it is an effect only, that is, it exists in such a condition of aggregation of material atoms, that its molecular arrangement serves as a medium through which is obtained the effect of magnetic electric light. But that omnipresent light, in which all modes and conditions of existence "live, move, "and have their being," transcends the phenomenal solar light, as much as the brilliance of the solar focus is positive to the negative curtain that surrounds it; but to human consciousness there can be no cognition of any such superior omnipresent light, until the molecular constitution of the brain and nervous system has attained to such a focal eleva