Modern science has demonstrated that of all unreliable things, ancient science is the most unreliable. We should, therefore, expect to eventually see modern science remanded to the same category. One of the greatest inventors of the age, Mr. Edison, whose inventions have had to do wholly with modern science, tells us that he has been constantly thrown off the track and misled by the frauds of science. He thus expresses his estimate of the authorities in modern science:
"They [the text-books] are mostly misleading. I get mad with myself when I think I have believed what was so learnedly set out in them. There are more frauds in science than anywhere else.... Take a whole pile of them and you will find uncertainty, if not imposition, in half of what they state as scientific truth. They have time and again set down experiments as done by them, curious, out-of-the-way experiments, that they never did, and upon which they have founded so-called scientific truths. I have been thrown off my track often by them, and for months at a time. You see a great name, and you believe it. Try the experiment yourself, and you find the result altogether different.... I tell you I'd rather know nothing about a thing in science, nine times out of ten, than what the books would tell me—for practical purposes, for applied science, the best science, the only science, I'd rather take the thing up and go through with it myself. I'd find out more about it than any one could tell me, and I'd be sure of what I know. That's the thing. Professor this or that will controvert you out of the books, and prove out of the books it can't be so, though you have it right in the hollow of your hand all the time and could break his spectacles with it."
Thus it is that these authorities have been weighed in the balances and found wanting. This is a marvelous age, an age of unsurpassed invention and discovery of truth, but it is not the ne plus ultra of human wisdom—if we are to take any lessons from the past ages.
The wave theory of sound, which has been regarded as a settled scientific fact since the days of Pythagorean, is now vigorously attacked, and the adherents to the orthodox ground will have to rally their forces and reconsider their proofs, if they save the theory from slumbering among the follies of the past.
In the past few years the world has been startled by the bold theory of evolution, as advocated by Darwin, Haeckel, Huxley and others. Many have felt uneasy about the foundations of our faith. But such alarm is all premature. The glaring contradictions of one another of these modern apostles of a "gospel of dirt," and their self-stultification, are enough to convince any thoughtful reader, that if the race has not developed from apes, a few of them bear marks of descent from asses! The credulity of this class of men is simply marvelous. They can believe that a moneron can be developed into a man, but can not believe in a miracle! Their wonderful development of a moneron into a man terminates with the boundary line of time, and thus the ne plus ultra is reached of their "infinite progression!"
In order to a proper appreciation of the present life, we must be deeply impressed with the nature of that which lies beyond. No one can well spend the present life who does not spend it in view of the life to come. Man must properly appreciate himself before he can live in harmonious relations with his being. No man can have that appreciation of himself essential to a true life, who believes that his ancestors were monerons and mud-turtles!
While there are many striking resemblances between animals and man, just such as we should expect to find from the hand of the same Creator, who began farthest from himself and worked to his own divine model, yet there are striking differentiae which demand profound consideration. Animals come into the world with the knowledge of their ancestors. The beaver knows just what its ancestors knew before the flood. It is born into the world with that transmitted knowledge. Its posterity will know no more during the millennium. On the contrary, man is born into the world an intellectual blank. However wise his parents, he inherits not one idea. He knows absolutely nothing except what he learns—learns from teachers and by experience. It would be incomprehensibly strange if man in his development from a mollusk, should accumulate inherited knowledge till he reaches the ne plus ultra of terrestrial life, and then by a sudden break in the chain of nature lose it all, and come into the world a born fool!! This would be "development," "natural selection," and the "survival of the fittest," with a vengeance! Here is a chasm between man and the lower animals, made by the hand of God, that human wisdom can never bridge.
In his intellectual, moral and spiritual development, man starts from zero. God has thus ordained it. He is dependent on progression for all that he is and all that he is to be. God simply gives him a start in this world, with the numberless ages of eternity before him for infinite advancement. The idea, therefore, that "death ends all" nips in the bud this grand conception of man's greatness, and blights forever that which is noblest and truest in his nature. To regard this life as the ne plus ultra of man's development, is to charge nature with a freak of folly, and an abortion in her best works. Men may laud human virtue for human virtue's sake; but if man is but the moth of a day, the fire-fly whose phosphorescent light flashes for a moment and then goes out in eternal night, his virtues are but the tales of the hour that have their value in the telling. If this life is all there is of man, then he is the most unmeaning portion of the creation of God. There is for him no perfection, no satisfying of his inherent wants, and the whole of his existence is a sham and a fraud. As Young has beautifully said:
"How poor, how rich, how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful, is man!