“The men you write about in your studies are, but not the men we see in the real world.  There is some apparently congenital defect in the Indians, for instance, that keeps them from choosing civilization and Christianity.  So with the Gypsies, very likely.  Everybody knows that Catholicism or Protestantism is a good deal a matter of race.  Constitution has more to do with belief than people think for.  I went to a Universalist church, when I was in the city one day, to hear a famous man whom all the world knows, and I never saw such pews-full of broad shoulders and florid faces, and substantial, wholesome-looking persons, male and female, in all my life.  Why, it was astonishing.  Either their creed made them healthy, or they chose it because they were healthy.  Your folks have never got the hang of human nature.”

“I am afraid this would be considered a degrading and dangerous view of human beliefs and responsibility for them,” the Reverend Doctor replied.  “Prove to a man that his will is governed by something outside of himself, and you have lost all hold on his moral and religious nature.  There is nothing bad men want to believe so much as that they are governed by necessity.  Now that which is at once degrading and dangerous cannot be true.”

“No doubt,” the Doctor replied, “all large views of mankind limit our estimate of the absolute freedom of the will.  But I don’t think it degrades or endangers us, for this reason, that, while it makes us charitable to the rest of mankind, our own sense of freedom, whatever it is, is never affected by argument.  Conscience won’t be reasoned with.  We feel that we can practically do this of that, and if we choose the wrong, we know we are responsible; but observation teaches us that this or that other race or individual has not the same practical freedom of choice.  I don’t see how we can avoid this conclusion in the instance of the American Indians.  The science of Ethnology has upset a good many theoretical notions about human nature.”

“Science!” said the Reverend Doctor, “science! that was a word the Apostle Paul did not seem to think much of, if we may judge by the Epistle to Timothy:  ‘Oppositions of science falsely so called.’  I own that I am jealous of that word and the pretensions that go with it.  Science has seemed to me to be very often only the handmaid of skepticism.”

“Doctor!” the physician said, emphatically, “science is knowledge.  Nothing that is not known properly belongs to science.  Whenever knowledge obliges us to doubt, we are always safe in doubting.  Astronomers foretell eclipses, say how long comets are to stay with us, point out where a new planet is to be found.  We see they know what they assert, and the poor old Roman Catholic Church has at last to knock under.  So Geology proves a certain succession of events, and the best Christian in the world must make the earth’s history square with it.  Besides, I don’t think you remember what great revelations of himself the Creator has made in the minds of the men who have built up science.  You seem to me to hold his human masterpieces very cheap.  Don’t you think the ‘inspiration of the Almighty’ gave Newton and Cuvier ’understanding’?”