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Updated: July 2, 2025
But all religions agree in believing in some kind of ghostly existence and in a continued life beyond the grave. I use the expression, "ghostly existence," because we can really trace the idea of God backward until we lose the definite figure in a very general conception, much as astronomers have taught us to lose a definite world in the primitive fire-mist.
No one ever saw the primitive fire-mist from which, as we are told, the world came into being. But the scientist cares little for that. He is concerned only to prove that the phenomena he is investigating really have a place in the objective order. If he decides that they have, he is satisfied; he has proved something to exist.
The progress of scientific discovery, so far from tending to verify, has served rather to invalidate the fundamental assumption on which the whole theory depends. That assumption was the existence of a Nebulous Fluid or Fire-Mist, capable of being distinguished, by certain characteristic marks, from unresolved nebulæ or clusters of stars.
Now, can it be reasonably asserted that the direct and immediate creation of such a being as Man would be more derogatory to the wisdom and power of God than the primordial production of "a universal Fire-Mist," or even of "electricity and albumen?" or, will it be pretended that immediate creation of molluscs as molluscs, of fishes as fishes, of reptiles as reptiles, would be less worthy of the great Author of Nature than the establishment of a system which must in due time give them birth, and that, too, not without the concurrence and coöperation of the Divine will; for "natural law is but another phrase for the action of the ever-present and sustaining God?"
In the beginning was the fire-mist. In that fire-mist began the process of development. It became worlds, systems innumerable, a stellar universe, and within this whole a solar order, an earth beating forward in preparation for the advent of life. Life when it came flowed into countless forms.
For not to insist on the consideration, so forcibly stated by others, that the natural argument for the Immortality of Man, or for the doctrine of a Future Life, as implying distinct individuality and continued self-consciousness, must be materially weakened, if not entirely neutralized, by a theory of development which traces the human lineage up through the monkeys and fishes to albumen impregnated by electricity, or, further still, to a diffused Nebula or universal Fire-Mist, we think that the Sensational and Materialistic speculations with which the work abounds have a tendency to weaken the evidence for a living, personal, spiritual God, as the Creator and Moral Governor of the world, and to diminish that reverence, confidence, and love, which these aspects of His character alone can inspire.
And on the bed, connected with him by a faintly luminous cord, lay the white, still, beautiful form of a dead boy. "And that was my body!" he cried, in awestruck wonder, though his words caused no vibration in the air. He looked at himself, and saw that he was glorious, encircled by a radiant fire-mist.
Here was a revelation of what, afterwards, was often revealed to me, that human personality is the crowning wonder of this wonderful universe, and that the forces which turn fire-mist into stars are not more inscrutable than is human character. He lifted up his head and gazed at me through his tears. 'Hal, he said, 'do you know why I have shown you this?
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