246 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION. 



question which was as superfluous as it was impious. 

 Thus it has come to pass that the only being com- 

 petent to inquire into his own antecedents has looked 

 at his history through the distorting prism of a 

 mythopoeic past! 



Perhaps, in the long run, the gain has exceeded 

 the loss. For, in the precedence of study of other 

 sciences more remote from man's " business and 

 bosom," there has been rendered possible a more 

 dispassionate treatment of matters charged with pro- 

 founder issues. Since the Church, however she may 

 conveniently ignore the fact as concession after con- 

 cession is wrung from her, has never slackened in 

 jealousy of the advance of secular knowledge, it was 

 well for human progress that those subjects of in- 

 quiry which affected orthodox views only indirectly 

 were first prosecuted. The brilliant discoveries in 

 astronomy, to which the Copernican theory gave im- 

 petus, although they displaced the earth from its 

 assumed supremacy among the bodies in space, did 

 not apparently affect the doctrine of the supremacy 

 of man as the centre of Divine intervention, as the 

 creature for whom the great scheme of redemption 

 had been formulated " in the counsels of the Trinity," 

 and the tragedy of the self-sacrifice of God the Son 

 enacted on earth. The surrender or negation of any 

 fundamental dogma of Christian theology was not 

 involved in the abandonment of the statement in 

 the Bible as to the dominant position of the earth 

 in relation to the sun and other self-luminous stars. 



