VIRCHOW AND EVOLUTION. 271 



human ethics, divorced not only from Brahma and the Brahmanic Trin- 

 ity, but even from the existence of God." ' These civilized and gallant 

 voices from the North contrast pleasantly with the barbarous whoops 

 which sometimes come to us along the same meridian — shouts of the 

 Mohawk that ought not to be heard among the groves of Academe. 



Looking backward from my present standpoint over the earnest 

 past, a boyhood fond of play and physical action, but averse to school- 

 work, lies before me. The aversion did not arise from intellectual 

 apathy or want of appetite for knowledge, but mainly from the fact 

 that my earliest teachers lacked the power of imparting vitality to what 

 they taught. Athwart all play and amusement, however, a thread of 

 seriousness ran through my character ; and many a sleepless night of 

 my childhood has been passed, fretted by the question, "Who made 

 God ? " I was well versed in Scripture ; for I loved the Bible, and was 

 prompted by that love to commit large portions of it to memory. Later 

 on I became adroit in turning my Scriptural knowledge against the 

 Church of Rome ; but the characteristic doctrines of that Church marked 

 only for a time the limits of inquiry. The eternal Sonship of Christ, 

 for example, as enunciated in the Athanasian Creed, perplexed me. The 

 resurrection of the body was also a thorn in my mind, and here I re- 

 member that a passage in Blair's " Grave " gave me momentary rest : 



" . . . . Sure the same power 

 That rear'd the piece at first and took it down 

 Can reassemble the loose, scatter'd parts 

 And put them as they were." 



The conclusion seemed for the moment entirely fair, but, with fur- 

 ther thought, my difficulties came back to me. I had seen cows and 

 sheep browsing upon churchyard grass, which sprang from the decay- 

 ing mould of dead men. The flesh of these animals was undoubtedly 

 a modification of human flesh, and the persons who fed upon them were 

 as undoubtedly, in part, a more remote modification of the same sub- 

 stance. I figured the self-same molecules as belonging first to one body 

 and afterward to a different one, and asked myself how two bodies so 

 related could possibly arrange their claims at the day of resurrection. 

 The scattered parts of each were to be reassembled and set as they 

 were. But, if handed over to the one, how could they possibly enter 

 into the composition of the other ? Omnipotence itself, I concluded, 

 could not reconcile the contradiction. Thus the plank which Blair's 

 mechanical theory of the resurrection brought momentarily into sight 

 disappeared, and I was again cast abroad on the waste ocean of specu- 

 lation. 



At the same time I could by no means get rid of the idea that the 

 aspects of Nature and the consciousness of man implied the operation 

 of a power altogether beyond my grasp — an energy the thought of 



' " Natural History of Atheism," p. 125. 



