Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/285

Rh human ethics, divorced not only from Brahma and the Brahmanic Trinity, but even from the existence of God." These civilized and gallant voices from the North contrast pleasantly with the barbarous whoops which sometimes come to us along the same meridian—shouts of the Mohawk that ought not to be heard among the groves of Academe.

Looking backward from my present standpoint over the earnest past, a boyhood fond of play and physical action, but averse to school-work, lies before me. The aversion did not arise from intellectual apathy or want of appetite for knowledge, but mainly from the fact that my earliest teachers lacked the power of imparting vitality to what they taught. Athwart all play and amusement, however, a thread of seriousness ran through my character; and many a sleepless night of my childhood has been passed, fretted by the question, "Who made God?" I was well versed in Scripture; for I loved the Bible, and was prompted by that love to commit large portions of it to memory. Later on I became adroit in turning my Scriptural knowledge against the Church of Rome; but the characteristic doctrines of that Church marked only for a time the limits of inquiry. The eternal Sonship of Christ, for example, as enunciated in the Athanasian Creed, perplexed me. The resurrection of the body was also a thorn in my mind, and here I remember that a passage in Blair's "Grave" gave me momentary rest:

The conclusion seemed for the moment entirely fair, but, with further thought, my difficulties came back to me. I had seen cows and sheep browsing upon churchyard grass, which sprang from the decaying mould of dead men. The flesh of these animals was undoubtedly a modification of human flesh, and the persons who fed upon them were as undoubtedly, in part, a more remote modification of the same substance. I figured the self-same molecules as belonging first to one body and afterward to a different one, and asked myself how two bodies so related could possibly arrange their claims at the day of resurrection. The scattered parts of each were to be reassembled and set as they were. But, if handed over to the one, how could they possibly enter into the composition of the other? Omnipotence itself, I concluded, could not reconcile the contradiction. Thus the plank which Blair's mechanical theory of the resurrection brought momentarily into sight disappeared, and I was again cast abroad on the waste ocean of speculation.

At the same time I could by no means get rid of the idea that the aspects of Nature and the consciousness of man implied the operation of a power altogether beyond my grasp—an energy the thought of