The success of the volunteer lies in keeping one large ear close to the turf.
Religious teachers have ever given to their people a cosmogony that was adapted to their understanding.
Who made it? God made it all. In how long a time? Six days. And then followed explanations of what God did each day.
Over against the volunteers with a taste for power and a fine corkscrew discrimination, there have been at rare intervals men with a desire to know for the sake of knowing. They were not content to accept any man's explanation. The only thing that was satisfying to them was the consciousness that they were inwardly right. Loyalty to the God within was the guiding impulse of their lives.
In the past, such men have been regarded as eccentric, unreliable and dangerous, and the volunteers have ever warned their congregations against them.
Indeed, until a very few years ago they were not allowed to express themselves openly. Laws have been passed to suppress them, and dire penalties have been devised for their benefit. Laws against sacrilege, heresy and blasphemy still ornament our statute-books; but these invented crimes that were once punishable by death are now obsolete, or exist in rudimentary forms only, and manifest themselves in a refusal to invite the guilty party to our Four-o'Clock. This hot intent to support and uphold the volunteers in their explanations of how the world was made, is a universal manifestation of the barbaric state, and is based upon the assumption that God is an infinite George the Fourth.
Six hundred years before Christ, Anaximander, the Greek, taught that animal life was engendered from the earth through the influence of moisture and heat, and that life thus generated gradually evolved into higher and different forms: all animals once lived in the water, but some of them becoming stranded on land put forth organs of locomotion and defense, through their supreme resolve to live. Anaximander also taught that man was only a highly developed animal, and his source of life was the same as that of all other animals; man's present high degree of development having gradually come about through growth from very lowly forms.
Anaxagoras, the schoolmaster of Pericles, also made similar statements, and then we find him boldly putting forth the very startling idea that between the highest type of Greek and the lowest type of savage there was a greater difference than between the savage and the ape. He also taught that the earth was the universal mother of all living things, animal and vegetable, and that the fecundation of the earth took place from minute, unseen germs that floated in the air.
According to modern science, Anaxagoras was very close upon the trail of truth. But there were only a very few who could follow him, and it took the combined eloquence and tact of Pericles to keep his splendid head in the place where Nature put it, and Pericles himself was compromised by his leaning toward "Darwinism."
Every man who speaks, expresses himself for others. We succeed only as our thought is echoed back to us by others who think the same. If you like what I say it is only because it is already yours. Moreover, thought is a collaboration, and is born of parents. If a teacher does not get a sympathetic hearing, one of two things happens: he loses the thread of his thought and grows apathetic, or he arouses an opposition that snuffs out his life.