comfort to them.

--These people have always been afraid of the astronomers,--said the
Master.--They were shy, you know, of the Copernican system, for a long
while; well they might be with an oubliette waiting for them if they
ventured to think that the earth moved round the sun. Science settled
that point finally for them, at length, and then it was all right,--when
there was no use in disputing the fact any longer. By and by geology
began turning up fossils that told extraordinary stories about the
duration of life upon our planet. What subterfuges were not used to get
rid of their evidence! Think of a man seeing the fossilized skeleton of
an animal split out of a quarry, his teeth worn down by mastication, and
the remains of food still visible in his interior, and, in order to get
rid of a piece of evidence contrary to the traditions he holds to,
seriously maintaining that this skeleton never belonged to a living
creature, but was created with just these appearances; a make-believe, a
sham, a Barnum's-mermaid contrivance to amuse its Creator and impose upon
his intelligent children! And now people talk about geological epochs
and hundreds of millions of years in the planet's history as calmly as if
they were discussing the age of their deceased great-grandmothers. Ten
or a dozen years ago people said Sh! Sh! if you ventured to meddle with
any question supposed to involve a doubt of the generally accepted Hebrew
traditions. To-day such questions are recognized as perfectly fair
subjects for general conversation; not in the basement story, perhaps, or
among the rank and file of the curbstone congregations, but among
intelligent and educated persons. You may preach about them in your
pulpit, you may lecture about them, you may talk about them with the
first sensible-looking person you happen to meet, you may write magazine
articles about them, and the editor need not expect to receive
remonstrances from angry subscribers and withdrawals of subscriptions, as
he would have been sure to not a great many years ago. Why, you may go
to a tea-party where the clergyman's wife shows her best cap and his
daughters display their shining ringlets, and you will hear the company
discussing the Darwinian theory of the origin of the human race as if it
were as harmless a question as that of the lineage of a spinster's
lapdog. You may see a fine lady who is as particular in her
genuflections as any Buddhist or Mahometan saint i