Herbert Spencer and the Doctrine of Evolution. 545 



other days he has taught us a more generous lesson in re- 

 gard to what is due from the manly and liberal-minded to 

 the heroic endeavours of noble and unrecognized men. 

 Many of his admirers will recall with pleasure the follow- 

 ing admirable passage : "What is the scholar, what is the 

 man/^;/-, but for hospitality to every new thought of his 

 time ? Have you leisure, power, property, friends ? you 

 shall be the asylum of every new thought, every unproved 

 opinion, every untried project, which proceeds out of good- 

 will and honest seeking. All the newspapers, all the 

 tongues of to-day, will, of course, at first defame what is 

 noble ; but you, who hold not of to-day, not of the times, 

 but of the everlasting, are to stand for it ; and the highest 

 compliment man ever receives from Heaven is the sending 

 to him its disguised and discredited angels." This is a 

 grand exhortation, and has no doubt thrilled many a reader 

 with enthusiasm for the rising thoughts of his time. But 

 the difficulty still remains, how to identify the celestial 

 messengers! Such are the eccentricities of human judg- 

 ment, that the sympathy which Mr. Emerson invokes is as 

 likely to be given to the worthless as to the worthy. And 

 what shall we say about the duty of common mortals re- 

 specting the " disguised and discredited angels," when the 

 Seer himself snubs the author of First Principles as a 

 "stock-writer," and says to the author of that unclean im- 

 posture, Leaves of Grass, " I greet you at the beginning of 

 a great career " ? 



Note A. — Page 306. 



Pulpit exposition, in this case, is to be taken as representing the force 

 of tradition, the persistence of habit, and the adherence to stereotyped 

 ideas and forms of expression, which have been so long used in sacred 

 relations that they have become sacred — rather than the actual and living 

 belief. There has come to be a great discrepancy in this matter between 

 pulpit presentations and the private opinions of clergj-men. An example 

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