recollect," he asked, "the numberless bands of
pilgrims who carried their money to the Holy Land, and brought back
shells? or was it preferable to think that the sea of Joppa and Sidon
had covered Burgundy and Milanais?" As for the seeming shells of the
less superficial deposits, "Are we sure," he inquired, "that the soil of
the earth cannot produce fossils?" Agate in some specimens contains its
apparent sprigs of moss, which, we know, never existed as the vegetable
they resemble; and why should not the earth have, in like manner,
produced its apparent shells? Or are not many of these shells mere lake
or river petrifactions?--one never sees among them "true marine
substances"!! "If there _were_ any, why have we never seen bones of sea
dogs, sharks, and whales?"!!! And thus he ran on, in the belief
apparently that he had to deal with but an ignorant priesthood, too
little acquainted with the facts to make out a case against him in
behalf of the Mosaic narrative, and whom at least, should argument fail
him, he could vanquish with a joke.

There was, however, a young German, who had not at the time quite made
up his mind either for the French school or against it, who was no
uninterested reader of Voltaire's disquisitions on fossil shells. And
this young man was destined to be in the coming age what the Frenchman
had been in the closing one,--the leading mind of Europe. He, too, had
been looking at fossils; and having no case to make out either for or
against Moses, or any one else, he had received in a fair and candid
spirit the evidence with which they were charged. And the gross
dishonesty of Voltaire in the matter formed so decided a turning point
with him, that from that time forward he employed his great influence in
bearing down the French school of infidelity, as a school detestably
false and hollow;--a warning, surely, to all, whether they stand up for
Revelation or against it, of the danger of being, like the witty
Frenchman, "wicked overmuch." "To us youths," says Goethe, in his
Autobiography, "with our German love of truth and nature, the factious
dishonesty of Voltaire, and the perversion of so many worthy subjects,
became more and more annoying, and we daily strengthened ourselves in
our aversion from him. He could never have done with degrading religion
and the sacred books for the sake of injuring priestcraft, as he called
it; and thus produced in me many an unpleasing sensation. But when I now
learned, th