THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.
A PHILOSOPHIC DEBATE.
A. I would like to hear your opinions regarding the antiquity of our race: geologists are daily becoming bolder and more unhesitating in their assertions on the subject; and we are fast drifting toward conclusions that seem to startle the religious world, and threaten to upset our confidence in that Book which we have been accustomed to regard with profoundest reverence.
B. Never, sir, never: the hand of true science can never rise as the antagonist of revelation: revelation, rightly understood, must ever find in science a brother, a protector, a friend.
A. How would you maintain your position, if the geologists should arrive at a final conclusion on the subject, and declare positively that men existed in the world twenty or thirty thousand years ago?
B. They have arrived at such a conclusion already; that is to say, they have, in a stratum which cannot be less than twenty thousand years old, unearthed some skeletons of a mammal resembling man. But let these skeletons resemble ours ever so closely, I, for one, am not prepared to concede that these creatures, when they existed, were men in the sense that we are. Revelation declares quite explicitly that the present race is not more than six thousand years old.
A. What theory, then, must we adopt respecting these human-shaped fossils? Why do you deny that they were men like us?
B. Tell me what a human being is, and I will answer your query.
A. The definition would be a somewhat prolix one.
B. It will be sufficient for our purpose that you admit two points regarding the existing race.