a quarry, his teeth worn down by mastication, and the remains of food still visible in his interior, and, in order to get rid of a piece of evidence contrary to the traditions he holds to, seriously maintaining that this skeleton never belonged to a living creature, but was created with just these appearances; a make-believe, a sham, a Barnum’s-mermaid contrivance to amuse its Creator and impose upon his intelligent children!  And now people talk about geological epochs and hundreds of millions of years in the planet’s history as calmly as if they were discussing the age of their deceased great-grandmothers.  Ten or a dozen years ago people said Sh!  Sh! if you ventured to meddle with any question supposed to involve a doubt of the generally accepted Hebrew traditions.  To-day such questions are recognized as perfectly fair subjects for general conversation; not in the basement story, perhaps, or among the rank and file of the curbstone congregations, but among intelligent and educated persons.  You may preach about them in your pulpit, you may lecture about them, you may talk about them with the first sensible-looking person you happen to meet, you may write magazine articles about them, and the editor need not expect to receive remonstrances from angry subscribers and withdrawals of subscriptions, as he would have been sure to not a great many years ago.  Why, you may go to a tea-party where the clergyman’s wife shows her best cap and his daughters display their shining ringlets, and you will hear the company discussing the Darwinian theory of the origin of the human race as if it were as harmless a question as that of the lineage of a spinster’s lapdog.  You may see a fine lady who is as particular in her genuflections as any Buddhist or Mahometan saint in his manifestations of reverence, who will talk over the anthropoid ape, the supposed founder of the family to which we belong, and even go back with you to the acephalous mollusk, first cousin to the clams and mussels, whose rudimental spine was the hinted prophecy of humanity; all this time never dreaming, apparently, that what she takes for a matter of curious speculation involves the whole future of human progress and destiny.

I can’t help thinking that if we had talked as freely as we can and do now in the days of the first boarder at this table,—­I mean the one who introduced it to the public,—­it would have sounded a good deal more aggressively than it does now.—­The old Master got rather warm in talking; perhaps the consciousness of having a number of listeners had something to do with it.

—­This whole business is an open question,—­he said,—­and there is no use in saying, “Hush! don’t talk about such things!” People do talk about ’em everywhere; and if they don’t talk about ’em they think about ’em, and that is worse,—­if there is anything bad about such questions, that is.  If for the Fall of man, science comes to substitute the rise of man, sir, it means the utter disintegration of all the spiritual pessimisms which have been like a spasm in the heart and a cramp in the intellect of men for so many centuries.  And yet who dares to say that it is not a perfectly legitimate and proper question to be discussed, without the slightest regard to the fears or the threats of Pope or prelate?