Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/510

494 changes in response to catastrophic disturbances in the environment. Upon this point he remarks:

"It is only through rapid movements of the crusts and sudden climatic changes, due either to terrestrial or cosmical causes, that environment can have seriously interfered with the evolution of life. These effects would, I conceive, be—1. Extermination; 2. Destruction of the biological equilibrium, thus violating natural selection; and, 3. Rapid morphological change on the part of plastic species. When catastrophic change burst in upon the ages of uniformity, and sounded in the ear of every living thing the words 'Change, or die,' plasticity became the sole principle of salvation. Plasticity, then, is that quality which, in suddenly enforced physical change, is the key to survival and prosperity. And the survival of the plastic, that is, of the rapidly and healthily modifiable during periods when terrestrial revolution offers to species the rigorous dilemma of prodigious change or certain death, is a widely different principle from the survival of the fittest in a general biological battle during terrestrial uniformity."

turning out of the Rev. Augustus Blauvelt, of the Dutch Reformed Church, by the Kingston tribunal, for alleged heresy, is one of the things so common nowadays as hardly to excite notice, and we should probably have heard little of this case had it not been that the theological body saw fit to put the trimmings on to the transaction in a way that was not agreeable to the reverend excommunicate. Not content to depose Mr. Blauvelt from his charge for non-conformity to the creed which he had agreed to uphold, they thought it desirable to give the proceeding an extra touch, and so accused him of betraying his Master. Mr. Blauvelt says that, when he found it impossible any longer to accept the creed to which he had subscribed, he would gladly have resigned, but the polity of the society did not allow it; and when they found it necessary to cut him off, he should have recognized the propriety of it, and acquiesced without protest. But when they proposed to "spot" him, and fasten on him the label of Judas, to save other denominations the trouble of looking into his character and belief, if they were so inclined, he did not assent, but appealed to a higher organization. He thought that, if such an outrage as that was to be perpetrated, it had better not be done in a corner, but by the whole responsible body in a conspicuous place, and where dissenters, if any there should be, might have the credit of favoring fair play. In the final issue, twenty-six men voted that the society had nothing further to do than to exscind the teacher who no longer taught approvingly. But ninety men thought differently, and seemed deeply to feel that every fagot, thumb-screw, and dungeon, of the last eighteen hundred years, and all the instruments and agencies of religious conformity, would be dishonored if this writer of independent articles in Scribner's Magazine did not get an extra kick at parting—all that the law allows in 1877.

But with these tactics of the Dutch Reformed Church we are not much concerned: what interests us far more is the initial aspect of the case, or that working of the theological polity which at the outset binds the conscience and fetters the thought of all who assume the function of public teachers, in its jurisdiction. The deeper question is one of religious liberty, of the rights of conscience, and the prerogative of independent expression. From this point of view, other recent cases are of interest.

The Rev. Mr. Miller, of Princeton, got into a dangerous way of thinking for himself, about the creed of his church, and, not being pious and politic enough to crush his rising queries as instigations of the devil, had the honesty to announce some conclusions about the mystery of the Trinity which were unpalatable to the SanhedrimSanhedrin [sic] to