Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/689

Rh the time of Bishop Butler the question was not only agitated but extended. It was seen by the clear-witted men who entered this arena that many of their best arguments applied equally to brutes and men. The bishop's arguments were of this character. He saw it, admitted it, accepted the consequences, and boldly embraced the whole animal world in his scheme of immortality.

Bishop Butler accepted with unwavering trust the chronology of the Old Testament, describing it as "confirmed by the natural and civil history of the world, collected from common historians, from the state of the earth, and from the late inventions of arts and sciences." These words mark progress; they must seem somewhat hoary to the Bishop's successors of to-day. It is hardly necessary to inform you that, since his time, the domain of the naturalist has been immensely extended—the whole science of geology, with its astounding revelations regarding the life of the ancient earth, having been created. The rigidity of old conceptions has been relaxed, the public mind being rendered gradually tolerant of the idea that not for six thousand, nor for sixty thousand, nor for six thousand thousand, but for æons embracing untold millions of years, this earth has been the theatre of life and death. The riddle of the rocks has been read by the geologist and paleontologist, from sub-Cambrian depths to the deposits thickening over the sea-bottoms of to-day. And upon the leaves of that stone-book are, as you know, stamped the characters, plainer and surer than those formed by the ink of history, which carry the mind back into abysses of past time, compared with which the periods which satisfied Bishop Butler cease to have a visual angle. Everybody now knows this; all men admit it; still, when they were first broached, these verities of science found loud-tongued denunciators, who proclaimed not only their baselessness considered scientifically, but their immorality considered as questions of ethics and religion: the Book of Genesis had stated the question in a different fashion, and science must necessarily go to pieces when it clashed with this authority. And as the seed of the thistle produces a thistle, and nothing else, so these objectors scatter their germs abroad, and reproduce their kind, ready to pray again the part of their intellectual progenitors, to show the same virulence, the same ignorance, to achieve for a time the same success, and finally to suffer the same inexorable defeat. Sure the time must come at last when human nature in its entirety, whose legitimate demands it is admitted science alone cannot satisfy, will find interpreters and expositors of a different stamp from those rash and ill-informed persons who have been hitherto so ready to hurl themselves against every new scientific revelation, lest it should endanger what they are pleased to consider theirs.