Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/503

Rh a thousand shapes, but under every guise remains still the firm friend of the human race.

Nor have the triumphs of science been less in the moral than in the physical and intellectual world. When the curtain of antiquity rises upon our race we find its moral condition of the lowest and most degrading character. What, then, has raised man out of that condition? It may have been revealed religion; but, in my opinion, scientific progress, by introducing higher and grander ideas, had much to do with it. Whatever may have been the cause, we have certainly left forever the dark ages of our fathers' beliefs. If we find a woman troubled with nervous disorder, we no longer look about for the person who has bewitched her, and cast that person into the water to be drowned as innocent, or to float and be burned as guilty; but we simply treat the woman for hysteria. If a man falls down and goes into convulsive movements with foaming at the mouth, we are not accustomed to follow the example of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and say he is possessed with an evil spirit; but we give him bromide of potassium or some other remedy to cure his epilepsy. If a plague or pestilence break out and sweep away half a city, we do not place our reliance on sacrifices and supplications addressed to the deities to avert their anger; but we seek the cause of it in a lack of cleanliness and remove the filth. We have learned that these things may be punishments sent from God, yet they come mediately, not for a moral sin, but for violating one of the physical laws of our being. Science found mankind everywhere believing that each tree, bush, or dark recess was peopled by an evil demon; but by the glorious sunlight of the nineteenth century she has banished these shapes of darkness from off the civilized earth, and planted in the brain of the people that intelligence, greater than an angel with a flaming sword, which shall forever prevent their return.

And then the ideas in regard to God, derived from the study of Nature, how surpassingly grand! The old Hebrew seers may have taught that Jehovah was infinite in power and wisdom, filling immensity with his presence, and existing from everlasting to everlasting; but it remained for astronomy, geology, and microscopy to show the profound significance of such utterances. Nothing is more humiliating than the study of Nature, However viewed, she but reflects back upon us the infinite wisdom and glory of her great designer.

Such have been some of the achievements of modern Science. She has, as it were, made a palladium out of the bones of Pel ops. She has, indeed, been a mother of plenty, scattering blessings everywhere with a liberal hand. As the gods in ancient times are fabled to have piled Pelion upon Ossa, and rolled upon the