“Did you see the thing done?” questioned a young skeptic, running his tongue into his cheek in a skillful way, and distorting his whole face with a disagreeable leer. He began to suspect that he was being cheated into listening to a Bible story.
Mrs. Roberts was prompt with her answer:—
“Oh, no, I did not, neither did I see the great fire that you had in this city about a year ago. At that time I was a thousand miles away; and it so happens that I have never talked with any person who did see it, yet I know there was a great fire, and many buildings were burned, and lives lost. It has been proved to me.”
“Oh, well,” said skeptic number two, while number one retired into silence to speculate over this answer, “fires are common enough things; anybody can know that they happen; but it ain't such a common affair to see a stick turn into a serpent and swallow up other serpents. I've seen them fellows make things that looked like snakes, myself; I could most swear to it that I'd seen them wriggle; but they never did no swallowing.”
“That is, they did not give unmistakable signs that they were alive. But do you think it too strange a thing for God to do? Surely he can make life! How is it that you are here, breathing, talking, thinking, if there is no power anywhere to make life?”
“Oh, I came from a tadpole,” said the boastful young scientist, putting his thumbs under his arms, and affecting an air of great wisdom. “I know all about that; I was there, and see the things wriggle.”
Evolution staring her in the face in a corner class in a mission school;—a class that had been gathered from the slums! Mrs. Roberts did not know that these are the very places in which to find it in all its coarseness. Yet she made haste to meet the boy on his own ground.
“Very well, if you choose to take that view of it. Was not the tadpole alive? Where did the life come from? You insist that the story I have been telling you is untrue because you know that none of these sleight-of-hand performers have ever, or can ever make actual life! That it is an impossible thing for human beings to do. Yet when I tell you that God did it you refuse the statement. How are you going to account for life? If, in its very lowest forms, it cannot be made by men who have given all their time to the study of the marvellous, how is it that it is everywhere about us, unless I am correct, and there is a Power that can produce life?”
Not a boy among them had heard the term “evolution;” knew anything about “the survival of the fittest.” They were entirely ignorant of “protoplasm” or “bioplasm;” yet not one of them but had caught the meaning of some of these terms as they had been translated for them into the vernacular of the city slums; not one in the class but perceived that their champion arguer had been met on his own ground and vanquished. Not with an outburst of horror; he had not even been informed that he was irreverent. Nimble Dick delighted in making each teacher tell him this; he had merely been replied to in the calmest of argumentative tones, and called upon to account for the facts in his own statements, and had been unable to do so. The crowd broke into a derisive laugh, and were noisy, it is true, and brought troubled frowns to the face of their superintendent, and made the flush on Alfred Ried's face deepen; yet if both these anxious watchers had known it, it was worthy of note that the laugh had been at the expense of one of their number, and not at their teacher.
“Well, go on,” interposed the youngest and quietest of the group. “Tell us some more about your old fellow with his serpents. Did they stay swallowed, and what did it all amount to, anyhow?”