546 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



of this occurred when Prof. Huxley was invited to address the clerical 

 body of Sion College, and took up, as the subject of his discourse, " The 

 Antiquity of the Earth, of Man, and of Civilization." His address was 

 followed by discussion, in accordance with custom, when several clergy- 

 men took occasion to express their surprise that Prof. Huxley should have 

 chosen such a subject for such an audience ; that his facts were very ele- 

 mentary, and his views long established and quite commonplace, and that 

 the speaker greatly underrated the intelligence of clergymen if he supposed 

 they needed primary lessons on that subject. To this Prof. Huxley re- 

 plied : " Why, then, do you not teach these things to your congregations?" 

 But there are plenty of clergymen still who inculcate the old views by no 

 means as a matter of routine. They maintain them with vigour, and still 

 denounce the modern doctrines with fiery vehemence. An illustration of 

 this is afforded by a sermon lately preached in New York by Rev. George 

 B. Cheever, on Evolution, of which the following passages are samples 

 from the Tribune report. Mr. Darwin having referred to the notion of the 

 special creation of man as a miserable hypothesis, Dr. Cheever remarks : 

 " Observe this language, the miserable assumption of a special creation, 

 spoken or written in the full knowledge that, instead of being an assump- 

 tion at all, it is the very first truth taught in the Bible, as clearly as the 

 being of a God, and no more to be disputed by a Christian than that, but 

 plainly revealed as the foundation of all the obligations and duties of 

 religion, and the corner stone on which the whole scheme of Christianity 

 rests. . . . 



" If you demand positive and actual chronology for these postulated, 

 illimitable ages, the archaeological and geological scientists have an alma- 

 nac of Greek scientific terminologies, under the cloak of which both ab- 

 sence and assumption of knowledge without facts they may hide them- 

 selves Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene ingenious compounds 

 of two Greek words ; the dawn of recent time, the less recent, the more 

 recent, the most recent. The use of these forms of scientific learning being 

 established, when you ask the age of any given development or stratum, 

 you are answered, it was Pliocene, or Post-Pliocene, or Eocene, or Miocene. 

 You must be content, for these are but parts of the grammar of endless 

 genealogies, which you must accept for certainties, and any further ques- 

 tioning can only show your ignorance of what be the very first principles 

 of the knowledge of earth and time in the processes of evolution. The 

 first postulate of this philosophy is that of countless millions of years to 

 work in, with no creator, and no authority that can bring it to book. Such 

 being the basis of scientific evolution, what can be the God, or the natural 

 principle, at work for such results through illimitable ages ? Is it any gain 

 to such a system, or does it obviate, or soften, or neutralize its irreligion, 



