It is certain that Life did not make the world with a view to its
own future requirements. For the world was at one time red hot,
and there can have been no living being upon it. Nor is it
conceivable that matter in which there was no life-inasmuch as it
was infinitely hotter than the hottest infusion which any living
germ can support-could gradually come to be alive without
impregnation from a living parent. All living things that we know
of have come from other living things with bodies and souls,
whose existence can be satisfactorily established in spite of
their being often too small for our detection. Since, then, the
world was once without life, and since no analogy points in the
direction of thinking that life can spring up spontaneously, we
are driven to suppose that it was introduced into this world from
some other source extraneous to it altogether, and if so we find
ourselves irresistibly drawn to the inquiry whether the source of
the life that is in the world-the impregnator of this earth-may
not also have prepared the earth for the reception of his
offspring, as a hen makes an egg-shell or a peach a stone for the
protection of the germ within it? Not only are we drawn to the
inquiry, but we are drawn also to the answer that the earth
was so prepared designedly by a Person with body and soul
who knew beforehand the kind of thing he required, and who took
the necessary steps to bring it about.

If this is so we are members indeed of the God of this world, but
we are not his children; we are children of the Unknown and
Vaster God who called him into existence; and this in a far more
literal sense than we have been in the habit of realising [sic]
to ourselves. For it may be doubted whether the monads are not as
truly seminal in character as the procreative matter from which