The history of art, especially as shown by architecture, in the

noblest monuments of the most enlightened nations of antiquity;

gives abundant proofs of the upward tendency of man from the

rudest and simplest beginnings.  Many columns of early Egyptian

temples or tombs are but bundles of Nile reeds slightly

conventionalized in stone; the temples of Greece, including not

only the earliest forms, but the Parthenon itself, while in parts

showing an evolution out of Egyptian and Assyrian architecture,

exhibit frequent reminiscences and even imitations of earlier

constructions in wood; the medieval cathedrals, while evolved

out of Roman and Byzantine structures, constantly show

unmistakable survivals of prehistoric construction. [195]



[195] As to evolution in architecture, and especially of Greek

forms and ornaments out of Egyptian and Assyrian, with survivals

in stone architecture of forms obtained in Egypt when reeds were

used, and in Greece when wood construction prevailed, see

Fergusson's Handbook of Architecture, vol. i, pp. 100, 228, 233,

and elsewhere; also Otfried Muller, Ancient Art and its Remains,

English translation, London, 1852, pp. 219, passim.  For a very

brief but thorough statement, see A. Magnard's paper in the

Proceedings of the American Oriental Society, October, 1889,

entitled Reminiscences of Egypt in Doric Architecture.  On the

general subject, see Hommel, Babylonien, ch. i, and Meyer,

Alterthum, i, S 199.





So, too, general history has come in, illustrating the unknown

from the known:  the development of man in the prehistoric period

from his development within historic times.  Nothing is more

evident from history than the fact that weaker bodies of men

driven out by stronger do not necessarily relapse into barbarism,

but frequently rise, even under the most unfavourable

circumstances, to a civilization equal or superior to that from

which they have been banished.  Out of very many examples showing

this law of upward development, a few may be taken as typical.

The Slavs, who sank so low under the pressure of stronger races

that they gave the modern world a new word to express the most

hopeless servitude, have developed powerful civilizations

peculiar to themselves; the, barbarian tribes who ages ago took

refuge amid the sand-banks and morasses of Holland, have

developed one of the world's leading centres of civilization;

the wretched peasants who about the fifth century took refuge

from invading hordes among the lagoons and mud banks of Venetia,

developed a power in art, arms, and politics which is among the

wonders of human history; the Puritans, driven from the

civilization of Great Britain to the unfavourable climate, soil,

and circumstances of early New England,--the Huguenots, driven

from France, a country admirably fitted for the highest growth of

civilization, to various countries far less fitted for such

growth,--the Irish peasantry, driven in vast numbers from their

own island to other parts of the world on the whole less fitted

to them--all are proofs that, as a rule, bodies of men once

enlightened, when driven to unfavourable climates and brought

under the most depressing circumstances, not only retain what

enlightenment they have, but go on increasing it.  Besides these,

we have such cases as those of criminals banished to various

penal colonies, from whose descendants has been developed a

better morality; and of pirates, like those of the Bounty, whose

descendants, in a remote Pacific island, became sober, steady

citizens.  Thousands of examples show the prevalence of this same

rule--that men in masses do not forget the main gains of their

civilization, and that, in spite of deteriorations, their

tendency is upward.



Another class of historic facts also testifies in the most

striking manner to this same upward tendency:  the decline and

destruction of various civilizations brilliant but hopelessly

vitiated.  These catastrophes are seen more and more to be but

steps in, this development.  The crumbling away of the great

ancient civilizations based upon despotism, whether the despotism

of monarch, priest, or mob--the decline and fall of Roman

civilization, for example, which, in his most remarkable

generalization, Guizot has shown to have been necessary to the

development of the richer civilization of modern Europe; the

terrible struggle and loss of the Crusades, which once appeared

to be a mere catastrophe, but are now seen to have brought in,

with the downfall of feudalism, the beginnings of the

centralizing, civilizing monarchical period; the French

Revolution, once thought a mere outburst of diabolic passion, but

now seen to be an unduly delayed transition from the monarchical

to the constitutional epoch:  all show that even widespread

deterioration and decline--often, indeed, the greatest political

and moral catastrophes--so far from leading to a fall of mankind,

tend in the long run to raise humanity to higher planes.



Thus, then, Anthropology and its handmaids, Ethnology, Philology,

and History, have wrought out, beyond a doubt, proofs of the

upward evolution of humanity since the appearance of man upon our

planet.



Nor have these researches been confined to progress in man's

material condition.  Far more important evidences have been found

of upward evolution in his family, social, moral, intellectual,

and religious relations.  The light thrown on this subject by

such men as Lubbock, Tylor, Herbert Spencer, Buckle, Draper, Max

Muller, and a multitude of others, despite mistakes, haltings,

stumblings, and occasional following of delusive paths, is among

the greatest glories of the century now ending.  From all these

investigators in their various fields, holding no brief for any

system sacred or secular, but seeking truth as truth, comes the

same general testimony of the evolution of higher out of lower.

The process has been indeed slow and painful, but this does not

prove that it may not become more rapid and less fruitful in

sorrow as humanity goes on.[196]



[196] As to the good effects of migration, see Waitz,

Introduction to Anthropology, London, 1863, p. 345.





While, then, it is not denied that many instances of

retrogression can be found, the consenting voice of unbiased

investigators in all lands has declared more and more that the

beginnings of our race must have been low and brutal, and that

the tendency has been upward.  To combat this conclusion by

examples of decline and deterioration here and there has become

impossible:  as well try to prove that, because in the

Mississippi there are eddies in which the currents flow

northward, there is no main stream flowing southward; or that,

because trees decay and fall, there is no law of upward growth

from germ to trunk, branches, foliage, and fruit.



A very striking evidence that the theological theory had become

untenable was seen when its main supporter in the scientific

field, Von Martius, in the full ripeness of his powers, publicly

declared his conversion to the scientific view.



Yet, while the tendency of enlightened human thought in recent

times is unmistakable, the struggle against the older view is not

yet ended.  The bitterness of the Abbe Hamard in France has been

carried to similar and even greater extremes among sundry

Protestant bodies in Europe and America.  The simple truth of

history mates it a necessity, unpleasant though it be, to

chronicle two typical examples in the United States.



In the year 1875 a leader in American industrial enterprise

endowed at the capital of a Southern State a university which

bore his name.  It was given into the hands of one of the

religious sects most powerful in that region, and a bishop of

that sect became its president.  To its chair of Geology was

called Alexander Winchell, a scholar who had already won eminence

as a teacher and writer in that field, a professor greatly

beloved and respected in the two universities with which he had

been connected, and a member of the sect which the institution of

learning above referred to represented.



But his relations to this Southern institution were destined to

be brief.  That his lectures at the Vanderbilt University were

learned, attractive, and stimulating, even his enemies were

forced to admit; but he was soon found to believe that there had

been men earlier than the period as signed to Adam, and even that

all the human race are not descended from Adam.  His desire was

to reconcile science and Scripture, and he was now treated by a

Methodist Episcopal Bishop in Tennessee just as, two centuries

before, La Peyrere had been treated, for a similar effort, by a

Roman Catholic vicar-general in Belgium.  The publication of a

series of articles on the subject, contributed by the professor

to a Northern religious newspaper at its own request, brought

matters to a climax; for, the articles having fallen under the

notice of a leading Southwestern organ of the denomination

controlling the Vanderbilt University, the result was a most

bitter denunciation of Prof. Winchell and of his views.  Shortly

afterward the professor was told by Bishop McTyeire that "our

people are of the opinion that such views are contrary to the

plan of redemption," and was requested by the bishop to quietly

resign his chair.  To this the professor made the fitting reply:

"If the board of trustees have the manliness to dismiss me for

cause, and declare the cause, I prefer that they should do it.

No power on earth could persuade me to resign."



"We do not propose," said the bishop, with quite gratuitous

suggestiveness, "to treat you as the Inquisition treated

Galileo."



"But what you propose is the same thing," rejoined Dr. Winchell.

"It is ecclesiastical proscription for an opinion which must be

settled by scientific evidence."



Twenty-four hours later Dr. Winchell was informed that his chair

had been abolished, and its duties, with its salary, added to

those of a colleague; the public were given to understand that

the reasons were purely economic; the banished scholar was

heaped with official compliments, evidently in hope that he would

keep silence.



Such was not Dr. Winchell's view.  In a frank letter to the

leading journal of the university town he stated the whole

matter.  The intolerance-hating press of the country, religious

and secular, did not hold its peace.  In vain the authorities of

the university waited for the storm to blow over.  It was

evident, at last, that a defence must be made, and a local organ

of the sect, which under the editorship of a fellow-professor had

always treated Dr. Winchell's views with the luminous inaccuracy

which usually characterizes a professor's ideas of a rival's

teachings, assumed the task.  In the articles which followed, the

usual scientific hypotheses as to the creation were declared to

be "absurd," "vague and unintelligible," "preposterous and

gratuitous."  This new champion stated that "the objections drawn

from the fossiliferous strata and the like are met by reference

to the analogy of Adam and Eve, who presented the phenomena of

adults when they were but a day old, and by the Flood of Noah and

other cataclysms, which, with the constant change of Nature, are

sufficient to account for the phenomena in question"!



Under inspiration of this sort the Tennessee Conference of the

religious body in control of the university had already, in

October, 1878, given utterance to its opinion of unsanctified

science as follows:  "This is an age in which scientific atheism,

having divested itself of the habiliments that most adorn and

dignify humanity, walks abroad in shameless denudation.  The

arrogant and impertinent claims of this `science, falsely so

called,' have been so boisterous and persistent, that the

unthinking mass have been sadly deluded; but our university

alone has had the courage to lay its young but vigorous hand upon

the mane of untamed Speculation and say, `We will have no more of

this.'" It is a consolation to know how the result, thus devoutly

sought, has been achieved; for in the "ode" sung at the laying

of the corner-stone of a new theological building of the same

university, in May, 1880, we read:





"Science and Revelation here

In perfect harmony appear,

Guiding young feet along the road

Through grace and Nature up to God."





It is also pleasing to know that, while an institution calling

itself a university thus violated the fundamental principles on

which any institution worthy of the name must be based, another

institution which has the glory of being the first in the entire

North to begin something like a university organization--the

State University of Michigan--recalled Dr. Winchell at once to

his former professorship, and honoured itself by maintaining him

in that position, where, unhampered, he was thereafter able to

utter his views in the midst of the largest body of students on

the American Continent.



Disgraceful as this history was to the men who drove out Dr.

Winchell, they but succeeded, as various similar bodies of men

making similar efforts have done, in advancing their supposed

victim to higher position and more commanding influence.[197]



[197] For Dr. Winchell's original statements, see Adamites and

Pre-Adamites, Syracuse, N. Y., 1878.  For the first important

denunciation of his views, see the St. Louis Christian Advocate,

May 22, 1878.  For the conversation with Bishop McTyeire, see Dr.

Winchell's own account in the Nashville American of July 19,

1878.  For the further course of the attack in the denominational

organ of Dr. Winchell's oppressors, see the Nashville Christian

Advocate, April 26, 1879.  For the oratorical declaration of the

Tennessee Conference upon the matter, see the Nashville American,

October 15, 1878; and for the "ode" regarding the "harmony of

science and revelation" as supported at the university, see the

same journal for May 2, 1880





A few years after this suppression of earnest Christian thought

at an institution of learning in the western part of our Southern

States, there appeared a similar attempt in sundry seaboard

States of the South.



As far back as the year 1857 the Presbyterian Synod of

Mississippi passed the following resolution:



"WHEREAS, We live in an age in which the most insidious attacks

are made on revealed religion through the natural sciences, and

as it behooves the Church at all times to have men capable of

defending the faith once delivered to the saints;



"RESOLVED, That this presbytery recommend the endowment of a

professorship of Natural Science as connected with revealed

religion in one or more of our theological seminaries."



Pursuant to this resolution such a chair was established in the

theological seminary at Columbia, S.C., and James Woodrow was

appointed professor.  Dr. Woodrow seems to have been admirably

fitted for the position--a devoted Christian man, accepting the

Presbyterian standards of faith in which he had been brought up,

and at the same time giving every effort to acquaint himself with

the methods and conclusions of science.  To great natural

endowments he added constant labours to arrive at the truth in

this field.  Visiting Europe, he made the acquaintance of many of

the foremost scientific investigators, became a student in

university lecture rooms and laboratories, an interested hearer

in scientific conventions, and a correspondent of leading men of

science at home and abroad.  As a result, he came to the

conclusion that the hypothesis of evolution is the only one which

explains various leading facts in natural science.  This he

taught, and he also taught that such a view is not incompatible

with a true view of the sacred Scriptures.



In 1882 and 1883 the board of directors of the theological

seminary, in fear that "scepticism in the world is using alleged

discoveries in science to impugn the Word of God," requested

Prof. Woodrow to state his views in regard to evolution.  The

professor complied with this request in a very powerful address,

which was published and widely circulated, to such effect that

the board of directors shortly afterward passed resolutions

declaring the theory of evolution as defined by Prof. Woodrow

not inconsistent with perfect soundness in the faith.



In the year 1884 alarm regarding Dr. Woodrow's teachings began

to show itself in larger proportions, and a minority report was

introduced into the Synod of South Carolina declaring that "the

synod is called upon to decide not upon the question whether the

said views of Dr. Woodrow contradict the Bible in its highest

and absolute sense, but upon the question whether they contradict

the interpretation of the Bible by the Presbyterian Church in the

United States."



Perhaps a more self-condemnatory statement was never presented,

for it clearly recognized, as a basis for intolerance, at least a

possible difference between "the interpretation of the Bible by

the Presbyterian Church" and the teachings of "the Bible in its

highest and absolute sense."



This hostile movement became so strong that, in spite of the

favourable action of the directors of the seminary, and against

the efforts of a broad-minded minority in the representative

bodies having ultimate charge of the institution, the delegates

from the various synods raised a storm of orthodoxy and drove Dr.

Woodrow from his post.  Happily, he was at the same time

professor in the University of South Carolina in the same city of

Columbia, and from his chair in that institution he continued to

teach natural science with the approval of the great majority of

thinking men in that region; hence, the only effect of the

attempt to crush him was, that his position was made higher,

respect for him deeper, and his reputation wider.



In spite of attempts by the more orthodox to prevent students of

the theological seminary from attending his lectures at the

university, they persisted in hearing him; indeed, the

reputation of heresy seemed to enhance his influence.



It should be borne in mind that the professor thus treated had

been one of the most respected and beloved university instructors

in the South during more than a quarter of a century, and that he

was turned out of his position with no opportunity for careful

defence, and, indeed, without even the formality of a trial.

Well did an eminent but thoughtful divine of the Southern

Presbyterian Church declare that "the method of procedure to

destroy evolution by the majority in the Church is vicious and

suicidal," and that "logical dynamite has been used to put out a

supposed fire in the upper stories of our house, and all the

family in the house at that."  Wisely, too, did he refer to the

majority as "sowing in the fields of the Church the thorns of its

errors, and cumbering its path with the debris and ruin of its

own folly."



To these recent cases may be added the expulsion of Prof. Toy

from teaching under ecclesiastical control at Louisville, and his

election to a far more influential chair at Harvard University;

the driving out from the American College at Beyrout of the young

professors who accepted evolution as probable, and the rise of

one of them, Mr. Nimr, to a far more commanding position than

that which he left--the control of three leading journals at

Cairo; the driving out of Robertson Smith from his position at

Edinburgh, and his reception into the far more important and

influential professorship at the English University of Cambridge;

and multitudes of similar cases.  From the days when Henry

Dunster, the first President of Harvard College, was driven from

his presidency, as Cotton Mather said, for "falling into the

briers of Antipedobaptism" until now, the same spirit is shown in

all such attempts.  In each we have generally, on one side, a

body of older theologians, who since their youth have learned

nothing and forgotten nothing, sundry professors who do not wish

to rewrite their lectures, and a mass of unthinking

ecclesiastical persons of little or no importance save in making

up a retrograde majority in an ecclesiastical tribunal; on the

other side we have as generally the thinking, open-minded,

devoted men who have listened to the revelation of their own time

as well as of times past, and who are evidently thinking the

future thought of the world.



Here we have survivals of that same oppression of thought by

theology which has cost the modern world so dear; the system

which forced great numbers of professors, under penalty of

deprivation, to teach that the sun and planets revolve about the

earth; that comets are fire-balls flung by an angry God at a

wicked world; that insanity is diabolic possession; that

anatomical investigation of the human frame is sin against the

Holy Ghost; that chemistry leads to sorcery; that taking

interest for money is forbidden by Scripture; that geology must

conform to ancient Hebrew poetry.  From the same source came in

Austria the rule of the "Immaculate Oath," under which university

professors, long before the dogma of the Immaculate Conception

was defined by the Church, were obliged to swear to their belief

in that dogma before they were permitted to teach even arithmetic

or geometry; in England, the denunciation of inoculation against

smallpox; in Scotland, the protests against using chloroform in

childbirth as "vitiating the primal curse against woman"; in

France, the use in clerical schools of a historical text-book

from which Napoleon was left out; and, in America, the use of

Catholic manuals in which the Inquisition is declared to have

been a purely civil tribunal, or Protestant manuals in which the

Puritans are shown to have been all that we could now wish they

had been.



So, too, among multitudes of similar efforts abroad, we have

during centuries the fettering of professors at English and

Scotch universities by test oaths, subscriptions to articles, and

catechisms without number.  In our own country we have had in a

vast multitude of denominational colleges, as the first

qualification for a professorship, not ability in the subject to

be taught, but fidelity to the particular shibboleth of the

denomination controlling the college or university.



Happily, in these days such attempts generally defeat themselves.

The supposed victim is generally made a man of mark by

persecution, and advanced to a higher and wider sphere of

usefulness.  In withstanding the march of scientific truth, any

Conference, Synod, Board of Commissioners, Board of Trustees, or

Faculty, is but as a nest of field-mice in the path of a steam

plough.



The harm done to religion in these attempts is far greater than

that done to science; for thereby suspicions are widely spread,

especially among open-minded young men, that the accepted

Christian system demands a concealment of truth, with the

persecution of honest investigators, and therefore must be false.

Well was it said in substance by President McCosh, of Princeton,

that no more sure way of making unbelievers in Christianity among

young men could be devised than preaching to them that the

doctrines arrived at by the great scientific thinkers of this

period are opposed to religion.



Yet it is but justice here to say that more and more there is

evolving out of this past history of oppression a better spirit,

which is making itself manifest with power in the leading

religious bodies of the world.  In the Church of Rome we have

to-day such utterances as those of St. George Mivart, declaring

that the Church must not attempt to interfere with science; that

the Almighty in the Galileo case gave her a distinct warning that

the priesthood of science must remain with the men of science.

In the Anglican Church and its American daughter we have the acts

and utterances of such men as Archbishop Tait, Bishop Temple,

Dean Stanley, Dean Farrar, and many others, proving that the

deepest religious thought is more and more tending to peace

rather than warfare with science; and in the other churches,

especially in America, while there is yet much to be desired, the

welcome extended in many of them to Alexander Winchell, and the

freedom given to views like his, augur well for a better state of

things in the future.



From the science of Anthropology, when rightly viewed as a whole,

has come the greatest aid to those who work to advance religion

rather than to promote any particular system of theology; for

Anthropology and its subsidiary sciences show more and more that

man, since coming upon the earth, has risen, from the period when

he had little, if any, idea of a great power above him, through

successive stages of fetichism, shamanism, and idolatry, toward

better forms of belief, making him more and more accessible to

nobler forms of religion.  The same sciences show, too, within

the historic period, the same tendency, and especially within the

events covered by our sacred books, a progress from fetichism, of

which so many evidences crop out in the early Jewish worship as

shown in the Old Testament Scriptures, through polytheism, when

Jehovah was but "a god above all gods," through the period when

he was "a jealous God," capricious and cruel, until he is

revealed in such inspired utterances as those of the nobler

Psalms, the great passages in Isaiah, the sublime preaching of

Micah, and, above all, through the ideal given to the world by

Jesus of Nazareth.



Well indeed has an eminent divine of the Church of England in our

own time called on Christians to rejoice over this evolution,

"between the God of Samuel, who ordered infants to be

slaughtered, and the God of the Psalmist, whose tender mercies

are over all his works; between the God of the Patriarchs, who

was always repenting, and the God of the Apostles, who is the

same yesterday, to-day, and forever, with whom there is no

variableness nor shadow of turning, between the God of the Old

Testament, who walked in the garden in the cool of the day, and

the God of the New Testament, whom no man hath seen nor can see;

between the God of Leviticus, who was so particular about the

sacrificial furniture and utensils, and the God of the Acts, who

dwelleth not in temples made with hands; between the God who

hardened Pharaoh's heart, and the God who will have all men to be

saved; between the God of Exodus, who is merciful only to those

who love him, and the God of Christ--the heavenly Father--who is

kind unto the unthankful and the evil."



However overwhelming, then, the facts may be which Anthropology,

History, and their kindred sciences may, in the interest of

simple truth, establish against the theological doctrine of "the

Fall"; however completely they may fossilize various dogmas,

catechisms, creeds, confessions, "plans of salvation" and

"schemes of redemption," which have been evolved from the great

minds of the theological period:  science, so far from making

inroads on religion, or even upon our Christian development of

it, will strengthen all that is essential in it, giving new and

nobler paths to man's highest aspirations.  For the one great,

legitimate, scientific conclusion of anthropology is, that, more

and more, a better civilization of the world, despite all its

survivals of savagery and barbarism, is developing men and women

on whom the declarations of the nobler Psalms, of Isaiah, of

Micah, the Sermon on the Mount, the first great commandment, and

the second, which is like unto it, St. Paul's praise of charity

and St. James's definition of "pure religion and undefiled," can

take stronger hold for the more effective and more rapid

uplifting of our race.[198]



[198] For the resolution of the Presbyterian Synod of Mississippi

in 1857, see Prof. Woodrow's speech before the Synod of South

Carolina, October 27 and 28, 1884, p. 6.  As to the action of the

Board of Directors of the Theological Seminary of Columbia, see

ibid.  As to the minority report in the Synod of South Carolina,

see ibid., p. 24.  For the pithy sentences regarding the conduct

of the majority in the synods toward Dr. Woodrow, see the Rev.

Mr. Flynn's article in the Southern Presbyterian Review for

April, 1885, p. 272, and elsewhere.  For the restrictions

regarding the teaching of the Copernican theory and the true

doctrine of comets in German universities, see various histories

of astronomy, especially Madler.  For the immaculate oath

(Immaculaten-Eid) as enforced upon the Austrian professors, see

Luftkandl, Die Josephinischen Ideen.  For the effort of the

Church in France, after the restoration of the Bourbons, to teach

a history of that country from which the name of Napoleon should

be left out, see Father Loriquet's famous Histoire de France a

l'Usage de la Jeunesse, Lyon, 1820, vol. ii, see especially table

of contents at the end.  The book bears on its title-page the

well known initials of the Jesuit motto, A. M. D. G. (Ad Majorem

Dei Gloriam).  For examples in England and Scotland, see various

English histories, and especially Buckle's chapters on Scotland.

For a longer collection of examples showing the suppression of

anything like unfettered thought upon scientific subjects in

American universities, see Inaugural Address at the Opening of

Cornell University, by the author of these chapters.  For the

citation regarding the evolution of better and nobler ideas of

God, see Church and Creed: Sermons preached in the Chapel of the

Foundling Hospital, London, by A. W. Momerie, M. A., LL. D.,

Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in King's College, London,

1890.  For a very vigorous utterance on the other side, see a

recent charge of the Bishop of Gloucester.