In a similar manner Professor Flint, of Edinburgh, arraigns Sir John Lubbock and certain other advocates of the atheistic theory concerning savage tribes, for the partiality of their selection of testimony and for the superficial evidence which they accept when favorable to their theories.  After reviewing Lubbock’s wholesale quotations concerning the Indian tribes of Brazil, he says, “These are Sir John Lubbock’s instances from South American tribes.  But I find that they are all either erroneous or insufficiently established.”  And he gives many counter-proofs.  “It will never do,” he says, “to believe such sweeping statements—­sweeping negatives—­merely because they happen to be printed.”  Farther on he adds:  “But I think that he (Lubbock) might have told us that Humboldt, whose travels in South America were so extensive, whose explorations were so varied, scientific, and successful, and who certainly was uninfluenced by traditional theological beliefs, found no tribes and peoples without a religion; and that Prince Max von Neuwied tells us that in all his many and wide wanderings in Brazil he had found no tribes the members of which did not give manifest signs of religious feelings.”

In the appendix of the book from which these extracts are made, Professor Flint says:  “No one, I think, who has not a theory to maintain can consider the circumstances in which most of the Brazilian Indian tribes are placed without coming to the conclusion that they must have sunk from a higher intellectual and religious level.”

I have dwelt at length upon these arraignments of the careless and biased utterances of supposed scientists, because it is so much the fashion of our times to support certain theories of anthropology by massing the supposed evidences of man’s degradation found, even now, in the environments of savage life.  Many readers, apparently dazed by the vast accumulation of indiscriminate and heterogeneous statements which they have no time to examine, yield an easy and blind assent, based either on the supposed wisdom of the writer or upon the fact that so many others believe, and they imagine that no little courage is required on their part to risk the loss of intellectual caste.  A vast amount of the thinking of our age, although it claims to be scientific, is really a matter of simple faith—­faith in the opinions and dicta of distinguished leaders.  And under such circumstances, is it not our privilege and our duty as Christian men to at least challenge and cross-question those theories which depress and dishonor our common humanity before we yield them our assent?

The majority of scientists now so confidently assume the certain derivation of man from lower orders of life, that, as Max Mueller has expressed it, their intolerance greets “with a perfect howl of derision a man like Virchow,” who dares to declare that proof of man’s derivation from animals is still wanting.  Nevertheless Virchow, himself an evolutionist, maintains his ground, as the following passage quoted some months since from The London Tablet will show: