758 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Sturtevant, of Illinois College, narrate an experience of his own 

 with Prof. Shedd, which, as the story was told in general com- 

 pany, may be referred to without any violation of confidence. It 

 was many years ago that he and Prof. Shedd went in company 

 from Andover to Boston, each intending to preach in a Boston 

 pulpit on the following Sunday. They returned on the same train, 

 Monday morning. 



" I don't know how it was with you, professor/' said President 

 Sturtevant, " but, for myself, I certainly felt like laying unusual 

 stress on evangelical doctrine yesterday, preaching in Boston 

 where so many loose theories are afloat." And Prof. Shedd replied : 

 " I really don't know anything about that. I never read books of 

 that class. All these infidel arguments were so much better put 

 by the writers of the seventeenth century." To have pierced 

 through such an armor is a great achievement, and the counter- 

 attack of the professor is in reality, as has been said, a supreme 

 proof of the immense influence now gained by evolutionary doc- 

 trine — a sort of rueful cry, " Thou hast conquered, O Evolution ! " 



Such complete failure to understand the great contribution to 

 knowledge and speculation made by the theory of evolution can 

 not but have a most deplorable influence when found in one occu- 

 pying so prominent a chair of instruction in so prominent an insti- 

 tution. A fair proportion of Prof. Shedd's students come from 

 colleges where they have been taught to regard evolution as one 

 of the settled things. They must come out from their lectures in 

 Union Seminary either dazed or indignant. Others, of course, 

 who have either taken a short cut to the ministry, or have had 

 their only education in some ecclesiastically controlled school 

 where they have met no competent teacher of natural science, 

 take in all that they are told on this, as on other subjects, and go 

 out to swell the number of ministers who know nothing of the 

 revolution wrought in human thought in the past thirty years. 

 They are the men who do all they can (of course unwittingly) to 

 make Christian belief an impossibility to a large class of intelli- 

 gent and educated young men. One of that class came to his pas- 

 tor, not long ago, and said : " I was at the meeting of the Be- 

 nighted Presbytery last week, and they were talking about evolu- 

 tion as a very dangerous thing, and finally passed a resolution 

 condemning it. I thought that everybody accepted evolution." 

 That young Presbyterian was a graduate of Harvard, and learned 

 of Prof. Gray (who, by the way, is a Balaam whom Prof. Shedd 

 in delightful innocence summons to curse evolution) to reconcile 

 evolution with theistic and even Christian belief, and was not 

 unnaturally surprised at running up against a chunk of the last 

 century. 



It would be wholly unfair to give the impression that such 



