152 
ization, and its intolerant democracy. And this man is one 
of America’s heroes. 
He was, I have said, in some respects even in advance of his 
age. His theology was gentle, tolerant, and liberal. He was 
one of the first to recognize the claims to the honest attention 
of good physical observers which those strange and apparent- 
ly abnormal physical phenomena make which went at first 
by the name of mesmerism, and which have been, since then, 
followed up and obscured by the fanatical and hurtful dis- 
honesties and shameless and tasteless profanities of the mod- 
ern round table. The evils attendant upon this strange 
psychological epidemic he was as quick to see as any man, 
and to recognize also its capacity for warping and marring 
the youthful science of this land; but no amount of material- 
istic denunciation from the side of specific science coul 
scare this fearless investigator from confessing his faith im 
what of fact there was, so far as he could discover it, nor 
from exercising the function of true science, — to wash his 
facts from the filth in which they were rolled, — to set them 
upon their appropriate shelves in the order of their worth. 
He was by nature not a materialist and a scoffer, but a 
spiritualist and a believer. He believed in immediate crea- 
tion by the fiat of God. He believed in the Hebrew poem 
of the creation as a substantial history. But even here he 
showed himself a man of genuine scientific spirit. He was 
obliged to interpret, and of course to criticise the Scriptures 
of his Church. But it is interesting to see how we always 
in this life return to our first loves. It was in his later years 
that he took up with zeal the defence of Genesis. He was 
_ forty-two and forty-four years old when he published, in 
1835 and 1837, his pamphlet on the connection of Geology 
: with Revelation, and his pamphlet on the historical and 
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