of teachers who could never have enough of thundering in the
ears of men their degradation, their lost, debased, insensate, and
damnable condition, worse than that of beasts or devils.

Now, with all deference, we beg to say that this development theory does
not strike us as so fraught with dishonor, either to the powers in
heaven or the beings upon earth. It has for many years impressed us with
its grandeur as an intellectual conception. We doubt whether anything so
grand has dawned upon the mind of modern civilization since the days of
Sir Isaac Newton. And we cannot see what dishonor it can work to either
God or man--especially if it be proved to be true. We regard it, so far
as there is truth in it, as one of those great germinant seed-thoughts,
which at long intervals are dropped into the soil of the human mind;
and though the mind of the age, in its first impulses of joy, may play
wild gambols with it, it is destined in the end to mould and control the
thinking of the civilized world. But apart from its truth or falsity, in
whole or in part, regarded simply _as an intellection_, it strikes us as
one of the grandest of modern times. Spreading itself over almost
illimitable space, grasping back through almost illimitable time,
claiming for itself the boundless multiplicity of type, and form, and
life, and law of the organic world, and unfolding to the wondering gaze
the vast prophetic possibilities of the future, it possesses all the
attributes of grandeur, magnificence, sublimity, and mystery. If it is a
phantasm, it is more gorgeous than the most splendid creations of
poetry. If it is a mirage, it is more beautiful than any that ever
bewildered the vision of enchanted traveller. If it is an _ignis
fatuus_, it is more potent than any ever raised by the spell of the
sorcerer. But whether phantasm, mirage, _ignis fatuus_, or sober but
grand reality, will assuredly be found out by science before another
half century. And the ultimate finding of science, whatever it may be,
must and will be believed.

It is, of course, not to be expected that the evidence thus adduced by
Sir Charles Lyell in behalf of the antiquity of man, will be accepted as
conclusive by the religious and thinking world in general without a
thorough sifting and an earnest struggle. It is too novel and
revolutionary in its tendencies. And indeed it ought to be subjected to
the severest ordeal of fact and reason. It is in this way alone that the
gold