cated persons. You may
preach about them in your pulpit, you may lecture about them, you may
talk about them with the first sensible-looking person you happen to
meet, you may write magazine articles about them, and the editor
need not expect to receive remonstrances from angry subscribers and
withdrawals of subscriptions, as he would have been sure to not a great
many years ago. Why, you may go to a tea-party where the clergyman's
wife shows her best cap and his daughters display their shining
ringlets, and you will hear the company discussing the Darwinian theory
of the origin of the human race as if it were as harmless a question as
that of the lineage of a spinster's lapdog. You may see a fine lady who
is as particular in her genuflections as any Buddhist or Mahometan saint
in his manifestations of reverence, who will talk over the anthropoid
ape, the supposed founder of the family to which we belong, and even go
back with you to the acephalous mollusk, first cousin to the clams and
mussels, whose rudimental spine was the hinted prophecy of humanity; all
this time never dreaming, apparently, that what she takes for a matter
of curious speculation involves the whole future of human progress and
destiny.

I can't help thinking that if we had talked as freely as we can and do
now in the days of the first boarder at this table,--I mean the one who
introduced it to the public,--it would have sounded a good deal more
aggressively than it does now.--The old Master got rather warm in
talking; perhaps the consciousness of having a number of listeners had
something to do with it.

--This whole business is an open question,--he said,--and there is no
use in saying, "Hush! don't talk about such things!" People do talk
about 'em everywhere; and if they don't talk about 'em they think about
'em, and that is worse,--if there is anything bad about such questions,
that is. If for the Fall of man, science comes to substitute the RISE
of man, sir, it means the utter disintegration of all the spiritual
pessimisms which have been like a spasm in the heart and a cramp in the
intellect of men for so many centuries. And yet who dares to say that
it is not a perfectly legitimate and proper question to be discussed,
without the slightest regard to the fears or the threats of Pope or
prelate?

Sir, I believe,--the Master rose from his chair as he spoke, and said in
a deep and solemn tone, but without any declamatory vehemence,--sir, I
bel