PROFESSOR VIRCHOW AND EVOLUTION. 381 



ence of God.' l These civilised and gallant voices from 

 the North contrast pleasantly with the barbarous whoops 

 which sometimes come to us along the same meridian. 



Looking backwards from my present standpoint 

 over the earnest past, a boyhood fond of play and 

 physical action, but averse to schoolwork, lies before 

 me. The aversion did not arise from intellectual 

 apathy or want of appetite for knowledge, but simply 

 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 serious- 

 ness ran through my character ; and many a sleepless 

 night of my childhood has been passed, fretted by 

 the question 4 Who made (rod ? ' 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 Eome,but the charac- 

 teristic doctrines of that Church marked only for a time 

 the limits of enquiry. 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 remember 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 further thought, my difficulties came back 

 to me. I had seen cows and sheep browsing upon 

 churchyard grass, which sprang from the decaying 

 mould of dead men. The flesh of these animals was 



1 Natural History of Atheism/ p. 125. 



