He pointed out that the moral idea was undergoing constant change; that what was considered justifiable in an earlier day was regarded as highly immoral now.  He pointed out that even the Decalogue made no reference to lying, except in the matter of bearing false witness against a neighbor.  Also, that there was a commandment against covetousness, though covetousness to-day was the basis of all commerce:  The general conclusion being that the morals of the Lord had been the morals of the beginning; the morals of the first-created man, the morals of the troglodyte, the morals of necessity; and that the morals of mankind had kept pace with necessity, whereas those of the Lord had remained unchanged.  It is hardly necessary to say that no one ever undertook to contradict any statements of this sort from him.  In the first place, there was no desire to do so; and in the second place, any one attempting it would have cut a puny figure with his less substantial arguments and his less vigorous phrase.  It was the part of wisdom and immeasurably the part of happiness to be silent and listen.

On another evening he began: 

“The mental evolution of the species proceeds apparently by regular progress side by side with the physical development until it comes to man, then there is a long, unexplained gulf.  Somewhere man acquired an asset which sets him immeasurably apart from the other animals—­his imagination.  Out of it he created for himself a conscience, and clothes, and immodesty, and a hereafter, and a soul.  I wonder where he got that asset.  It almost makes one agree with Alfred Russel Wallace that the world and the universe were created just for his benefit, that he is the chief love and delight of God.  Wallace says that the whole universe was made to take care of and to keep steady this little floating mote in the center of it, which we call the world.  It looks like a good deal of trouble for such a small result; but it’s dangerous to dispute with a learned astronomer like Wallace.  Still, I don’t think we ought to decide too soon about it—­not until the returns are all in.  There is the geological evidence, for instance.  Even after the universe was created, it took a long time to prepare the world for man.  Some of the scientists, ciphering out the evidence furnished by geology, have arrived at the conviction that the world is prodigiously old.  Lord Kelvin doesn’t agree with them.  He says that it isn’t more than a hundred million years old, and he thinks the human race has inhabited it about thirty thousand years of that time.  Even so, it was 99,970,000 years getting ready, impatient as the Creator doubtless was to see man and admire him.  That was because God first had to make the oyster.  You can’t make an oyster out of nothing, nor you can’t do it in a day.  You’ve got to start with a vast variety of invertebrates, belemnites, trilobites, jebusites, amalekites, and that sort of fry, and put them into soak in a primary