Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/391

Rh every one of these systems includes—and professes to include—features suitable to the special time and the special place when and where it was propounded. How much of any system may thus be regarded as local or temporary or both may be a moot point; but that some of each system is of that sort is absolutely certain. "Because of the hardness" of men's hearts the Mosaic system, for instance, had certain rules; and, because of the weakness of their hearts (who can doubt it?), the system which replaced that of Moses had certain other rules. The same is true of every system of conduct ever propounded. We may believe the rule sound and good in its own time and place, "Whosoever shall smite you on the right cheek turn to him the other also," and "If any man will sue thee at the law and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also." A man may believe these rules to be more than sound and good, to be of divine origin—yet recognize that in our own time, and here, in Europe or America, the rules would work ill. He who so taught recognized in the same way that other rules which had been good in their time had lost their virtue with changing manners. He knew where it is written, "Thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth," and so on; yet he only quoted these Scripture teachings to correct them—"But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil, but whosoever," etc. When he thus corrected what was "said by them of old time," he did not show disrespect—whatever the Scribes and Pharisees tried to make out—for the teachers of old time, whose words he read and expounded. He knew that "old times were changed," and therefore old manners and morals gone. He said, "Suffer little children to come unto me," and loved them, not teaching—as had seemed more convenient and was (let us believe) better, in earlier days—that the child would be spoiled unless diligently belabored with the rod.

These times and the races and the nations now most prominent on the earth are even more unlike the community in Palestine nineteen centuries ago, than that community was unlike the Jewish people in the days of the more ancient lawgiver. The opponents of evolution may prefer to believe that the human race has been stereotyped; but facts are a little against them. And even if we admitted the imagined fixedness of the human race for nineteen centuries, they would still have to explain the contradiction between two systems for both of which they find the same authority. Of course, there is no real or at least no necessary contradiction. Grant the human race to be what we know it to be, a constantly developing family, and the contradiction vanishes—we simply learn that what is best for one time is not best for another, even among one and the same people; how much more, then, must the best rules of conduct vary when different peoples as well as different times are considered!

All this, however, is a disgression, which should have been unnecessary, but has in a sense been forced on me by the misapprehensions of