error commonly entertained that marriageable men and women have nothing to consider except wealth, station, or social relationship, demands correction. The offspring of marriage, the most precious of all fortunes, deserves, surely, as much forethought as is bestowed on the offspring of the lower animals."" "If it were not so, if heredity were not in any way interfered with, the child must, of necessity, be a perfect mean of the parents, and all children of the same parents must be identical. Now we know that this is not so. An exact likeness, physical, mental, or moral, is never transmitted by inheritance; such a thing is impossible. It has been said that no two blades of grass are exactly alike, and it is certain that no two faces, bodies, minds, or moral natures are exactly alike. . . . The slight variations constantly met with in the family are due, for the most part, to the various blendings of the parental characters, which a moment's consideration will show may be endless. Remnants of the countless characters of the ancestors are present in each parent, some strong, some weak, some standing out prominently, others almost effaced. Nor are they even thus a constant quantity, for while the life of the individual develops one, it may allow another to fade into oblivion. Thus the children begotten at different periods of life, even if they were examples of the mean of the parents, must vary considerably. As it is, one child will inherit some peculiar character from one parent, in whom that particular character is just then prominent and active; another child will inherit largely some other characteristic from the same or the other parent; while a third may by some happy blending of perhaps mediocre parental characters become the fortunate inheritor of some physical or mental character of a higher order."-" Marriage and Disease," by Dr. Strahan. If the chemistry of inorganic things is identical through infinite worlds in time and space, so the same chemistry rules, and has ruled, in the reign of living creatures on our earth through all time. The same atoms and molecules, arranged and acting under ascertained laws, but in conditions other than those of things not living, combine to form the living beings— from the Amoeba to Man, from the Eozoon (if such there be) of the earliest days of earth, to the most recently developed specimen of the human race. Maxwell lightly touches this wondrous theme: "Thus molecular science sets us face to face with physiological theories. It forbids the physiologist from imagining that structural details of infinitely small dimensions can furnish an explanation of the infinite variety which exists in the properties and functions of the most minute organisms. "A microscopic germ is, we know, capable of development into a highly organized animal. Another germ, equally microscopic, becomes, when developed, an animal of a totally different kind. Do all the differences, infinite in number, which distinguish the one animal from the other, arise each from some difference in the structure of the respective germs? Even if we admit this as possible, we shall be called upon by the advocates of Pangenesis to admit still greater marvels. For the microscopic germ, according to this theory, is no mere individual, but a representative body, containing members col lected from every rank of the long-drawn ramification of the ancestral tree; the number of these members being sufficient not only to furnish the hereditary characteristics of every organ of the body, but to afford a stock of latent gemmules to be passed on in an inactive state from germ to germ, till at last the ancestral peculiarity which it represents is revived in some remote descendant."—"Science in Secondary Schools-Properties of Germs," pp. 25-28. By Sir H. W. Acland, Bart., M.D. Discussion TV Delivered in the Chapel of the Protestant Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April, 1892 "When the critic has done his best, THIRD PRIMARY CONVICTION "I believe that the third day He rose again."* A A LITERARY PROOF OF THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST No one probably would now maintain that the style of the New Testament is, in itself, miraculous; though every Christian believes that it is in no wise inconsistent with the grant of divine guidance to its writer. Still there are laws of style and literary form. There are laws of literature, because literature is a product of mind, and mind never works lawlessly. There are internal probabilities of language and manner from which veracity or falsehood may be inferred. There are what may be called literary impossibilities. That which Shakespeare has attempted and failed to do, that which a critic like Sir Walter Scott pronounces to be impossible, may fairly be considered beyond the reach of attainment by imaginative invention. I am not, I must repeat, about to argue that the style and literary adjuncts of St. Luke, in the narra *Luke xxiv. 13-36. |