14 EVOLUTION AND DOGMA. 



they had a breadth of view and an acuteness of intel- 

 lect, which, considering their environment and the 

 age in which they lived, were simply astonishing. 

 Well have they been called " the teachers of Greece," 

 for all the subtlety of thought and keenness of per- 

 ception, all the love of science, art and letters, which 

 were so characteristic of the Greek mind, were pos- 

 sessed in an eminent degree by those old pre-Baby- 

 lonian masters who thought and taught and wrote 

 many long generations before Abraham left Ur of 

 the Chaldees, untold centuries before Thales taught 

 and Homer sang. And the musings of the mystic 

 Hindu along the banks of the Indus and the Ganges ; 

 the meditations of the Egyptian priest in the tem- 

 ples of Memphis and Heliopolis ; the speculations 

 of the wise men of Attica and Ionia, all turned more 

 or less on the same topics which possessed such a 

 fascination for the sages of old Chaldea, and which 

 were discussed with such zest in the schools of 

 Nineveh and Babylon. 



Whence are we? Whither are we going? 

 Whence this earth of ours and the plants and animals 

 which make it their home ? Whence the sun, and 

 moon, and stars those distant and brilliant, yet mys- 

 terious representatives of our visible universe? Did 

 they have a beginning, or have they existed from all 

 eternity ? And if they had a beginning, are they 

 the same now as they were when they first came 

 into existence, or have they undergone changes, and, 

 if so, what are the nature and the factors of such 

 changes? Are the development and mutations of 

 things to be referred to the direct and immediate 



