June 1, 1887.] 



♦ KNOWLEDGK ♦ 



173 



mildly. In a college it is the .same ; in fact, most of the young 

 men in our colleges were lads in our schools a few years 

 before. Thus there are a few capital classical scholars and 

 first-rate mathematicians iu our colleges, while there are 

 numbers who are above the average in ability and educa- 

 tion ; but there are many times as many more who are 

 below ; and some are unutterably stupid. For the sake of 

 these last, the Church ministry has to be made very easy 

 of enti-ance ; how easy only those know who have either 

 gone through or have at least paid all such educational toll 

 as the through passage requires. We who write learned 

 much more theology in a year at King's College, London, at 

 the ripe age of eighteen, than many of our fellow-Cantabs, 

 now in the Church, learned during their University career. 

 Many were unable, and not a few were unwilling, to learn 

 more than just took them through, perhaps after much 

 preliminary plucking. Yet not a particle of the small 

 allowance of theological training necessary to admit bearer 

 to the pulpit, scarcely a particle of the course of theological 

 study which the better intellects pursued, had any bearing 

 whatever on the wider or nobler problems of religion. 



As to earnestness of character and purpose, English 

 clerics present the same variety as English college youths, 

 or as lads at English schools. But college life is not calcu- 

 lated to make men more earnest than they would have been 

 without it. The future surpliced teacher in our country 

 pulpits and parsonages is generally a good sort of fellow 

 while at college. He probably plays a good game at cricket 

 or tennis, or he rows well and staunchly, or he may be good 

 both with the oar and the bat. He plays generally a fair 

 hand at whist, and he usually likes good wine and good 

 cheer. We like him none the worse for these innocent 

 tastes and qualities : but tbey are not such as to assure us 

 that he is exceptionally earnest in religious matters, or that 

 he will be much better able than the student of science to 

 solve perplexing problems of religion or philosophy.* For. 

 be it remembered, the man of science usually has had a 

 special calling, he possesses usually special ability, and he , 

 has usually had a special training for discussing questions 

 whose relation to the higher philo.sophy of religion is some- 

 what nearer than the relation of whist or cricket, or even 

 Greek and Latin syntax, to theological and doctrinal 

 problems. 



If the English Church, which being established may be 

 supposed careful in such matters, has no class of trained 

 teachers, though individual members of her priesthood may 

 have studied her specific doctrines with special care, we may 

 be sure that no body of Nonconformists is better provided 

 with profound thinkers who are specially able, because 

 of true calling, marked abilities, and long-continued study, 

 to speak with authority, even about doctrinal matters. 

 Individual preachers may in this sense be competent 

 teachers, but the greater number cannot be. Assuredly 

 whether they might be or could be, they are not, as their 



* A friend of the writer's, whom we will call S., called a year or 

 two after taking his degree on a college friend, whom we will call 

 H., a parson in a dull but devout village. They were talkiilg over 

 the pleasant days of yore at dear old " John's," when two old ladies 

 called to inquire how grace might best be obtained. " Don't go, 

 S.," said H,, who devoted for awhile his apparently most earnest 

 attention to the old ladies' trouble. At last, sat prata biherant, the 

 visitors departed, full of praise for the "excellent young man,'' 

 whose carefully parted hair and mark-of-the-beast waistcoat had 

 probably impressed them fully as much, had they but known it, as 

 the weli-worn platitudes he had addressed to them. 'With a sigh of 

 relief, as he closed the door after them, the excellent young man, 

 who really was a good fellow, though not over-earnest, turned to his 

 friend, saying, " Thank goodness, those two old cats are gone 1 

 Come, S., my lad, let's have some beer." Our friend H. typilies a 

 class — and, by the way, those two old ladies typify another. And 

 both classes are very much larger than many imagine. 



preaching shows. And even did each religious sect provide 

 a class of teachers duly qualified ami thoroughly trained, 

 the wider and nobler questions of religion — which are not 

 the dreary problems of theology, church history, or ritual, 

 but far higher and far worthier of study — would not lie 

 brought within the scope of such teachers. 



We should not care to define what qualities or what 

 training would best fit a man for the discussion of the 

 nobler problems of religion or philosophy. We believe that 

 the best and purest, the most earnest and thoughtful, the 

 man of keenest intellect and most fervent imagination, is 

 not fit to penetrate within the temple wherein the Divine 

 Mystery is enshrined. But among all men, though all men 

 be unfit, none can nearer attain fitness to approach the 

 temple than those who contemplate the Mysteries of Infinite 

 Time and Infinite Space, of Infinite Might and Infinite 

 Life, all ruled by Infinite and Etern.al Law. They alone 

 ]ierceive what marvels of knowable truth lie within the 

 infinite domain of the Unknowable. 



THE STORY OF CREATION. 



a plain account of evolution, 

 By Edward Clodd. 



PART II. 



CnVPTER TI— FACTS IN SUrPORT OF DERIV.VTION OF 

 SPECIES. 



HE evidence supplied by living things in 

 support of their common descent is fivefold : 

 viz., 1, in their beginnings and develop- 

 ment ; :2, in their structural likene.sses ; 

 3, in their typical divisions ; 4, in their 

 succession in time : 5, in their distribution 

 in space. 



I. Emb)->/ologi/. — The eggs or germs from which all 

 living things spring are simple cells, made of the same 

 sticky stuff called protoplasm, and are, to outward seeming, 

 exactly alike. And this likeness persists through the 

 earlier stages of all the higher animals, even after the form 

 of the living thing is traceable in the embryo. In proof 

 of this Darwin quotes the following from Yon Baer, the 

 discoverer of this remarkable Hict : — 



" In my possession are two little embryos in spirit, 

 whose names I have omitted to attach, and at present I am 

 quite unable to s.ay to what class they belong. They may 

 be lizards or small birds, or very young mammalia, so com- 

 plete is the similarity in the mode of form.ation of the head 

 and trunk in these animals. The extremities, however, are 

 still absent in these embryos. But even if they had existed in 

 the earliest stage of their development we should learn 

 nothing, for the feet of lizards and mammals, the wings and 

 feet of birds, no less than the hands and feet of man, 

 all arise from the same fundamental form."* In further 

 evidence of this inter-relation of living things, their 

 embryos epitomise, as it were, during development, the 

 series of changes through which the ancestral forms passed 

 in their ascent from the simple to the complex ; the higher 

 structures passing through the same stages as the lower 

 structures up to the point when they are marked off irom 

 them, yet never becoming the form which they repre- 

 sent for the time being. For example, the embryo 

 of man has at the outset gill-like slits on each side 

 of the neck like a fish ; these give place to a membrane 

 like that which supersedes gills in the development of 



* " Origin of Species," p. 388. 



