Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/424

408 which form so large a part of the record, it is not because those ages were not in possession of a well-established and firmly believed theology; it is not because any modern scientific views had arisen to weaken the sense of the sacredness of human life. It was simply and purely because a very inferior degree of sacredness—all theoretical reasons to the contrary notwithstanding—was in reality attached to human life. Men's minds had not then been expanded and enlarged, nor had their sympathies been quickened, as they have been since knowledge began to grow by leaps and bounds. Certain theological doctrines, moreover, which then universally prevailed, had a direct tendency to deaden sympathy and pervert all natural standards of right and wrong; we refer especially to that conception of hell which was the fundamental motive of all persecutions for heresy and witchcraft. The sum of human misery which must be attributed to this one cause baffles calculation. On the other hand, no fact in history is more overwhelmingly attested than that an increase in humanity has accompanied, and continues to accompany, a relaxation of the rigors of theological belief.

In that whimsical book, The Green Carnation, there is a parson introduced who, on the word science being mentioned, immediately remarks, "Indeed, I have no opinion of science." Our bishop, however, is not content with having "no opinion of science"; he goes further and has "no opinion," or, to be more accurate, a shockingly bad opinion, of Nature. Let us listen to this episcopal teacher: "There is nothing sacred in Nature. Certainly she treats life with very scant reverence, be it vegetable or animal. Nature's forces ruthlessly trample out and trample down life in all its forms. She is the bloodiest-handed of all murderers. She ravens in beak and claw." A little while ago it was Prof. James who was describing Nature as a harlot; to-day the Bishop of Mississippi finds that the most appropriate epithet he can bestow on it is "the bloodiest-handed of all murderers." What says Matthew Arnold?

The Harvard professor curses in the interest of his pessimism; the divine, in the interest of his theology; and neither seems in the least alive to the humor of the situation. While they curse, the sun shines and the wind blows, the great processes of Nature go on, and the drama of human destiny develops itself just as if there was no such thing in the world as a pessimistic professor or a damnatory divine. Nature does not ask any one to admire or belaud her. She has given, or the power behind her has given, to countless tribes a share in what we call life. She guarantees nothing save the permanence of law; but she has set in operation certain principles of development which, in the case of man, have carried him, under favoring circumstances, to a high degree of eminence over the rest of the creation. Man thus finds himself possessed of self-consciousness and the power of adapting means to ends, of reading the secrets of Nature, and greatly increasing his resources for happiness and progress. At what point in man's evolution from "the primeval slime" which the bishop so dislikes to think about—though the scriptural "dust" would only require a little moistening to make a fair article of slime—at what point, we say, of man's evolution the social