l
for Mr. Tyndall to warn off everybody, but evolutionists, from any
investigations into cosmogony; about which he owns that they know very
little now, and will not know much for some millions of years to come.
But common people, who will not live so long, but who in the meantime
have to live and make money, and save it, who have children to rear,
and houses which they do not want burned over their heads, who have
taxes to pay, increasing every year, and public plunderers to prosecute
and whose ballots may be asked one of these days for the substitution of
the communes of the original apes, and the Red Republic for these United
States, all upon the alleged scientific proof for the truth of the
doctrine of evolution, and the consequent abolishment of
Christianity--common people, I maintain, by whose money and votes this
dogma is to be established, will not be debarred from asking the why and
the wherefore, neither by Mr. Tyndall, nor by any other scientific pope.
It is a little too late in the day for men who do not know their own
mind from the Alps to Belfast, and who doubt whether God made them
whenever they are dyspeptic, to stand up before the public demanding
that we shut our eyes and open our mouths, and swallow every
preposterous notion they think proper to proclaim as science, to the
destruction of our faith in the God who made us, of our respect for our
brethren of mankind, and of our hope of heaven.

_II. The Illogical Structure of the Theory._

When men come before the world with a dogma freighted with such
wide-reaching revolutions, they ought to be prepared to furnish the most
irrefragable proofs of its truth, and of its obligation and authority.
We should be able to establish it beyond all controversy as based on a
series of facts which take their place historically in the line of the
inductive sciences; about which all men of science are agreed, as all
astronomers, for instance, are agreed about gravitation; and we should
be able to show that each of the alleged consequences flows inevitably
and logically from these established facts. Ignorance, hypothesis,
assumption of facts, sophisms, begging the question, and the like, are
wholly impertinent in any such discussion. Were they even tolerable in
the field of metaphysical discussion, they must, by the rules of the
Positive Philosophy itself, banishing all but ascertained facts from the
halls of science, be excluded from this discussion of an alleged gen