Ten
or a dozen years ago people said Sh! Sh! if you ventured to meddle with
any question supposed to involve a doubt of the generally accepted Hebrew
traditions. To-day such questions are recognized as perfectly fair
subjects for general conversation; not in the basement story, perhaps, or
among the rank and file of the curbstone congregations, but among
intelligent and educated persons. You may preach about them in your
pulpit, you may lecture about them, you may talk about them with the
first sensible-looking person you happen to meet, you may write magazine
articles about them, and the editor need not expect to receive
remonstrances from angry subscribers and withdrawals of subscriptions, as
he would have been sure to not a great many years ago. Why, you may go
to a tea-party where the clergyman's wife shows her best cap and his
daughters display their shining ringlets, and you will hear the company
discussing the Darwinian theory of the origin of the human race as if it
were as harmless a question as that of the lineage of a spinster's
lapdog. You may see a fine lady who is as particular in her
genuflections as any Buddhist or Mahometan saint in his manifestations of
reverence, who will talk over the anthropoid ape, the supposed founder of
the family to which we belong, and even go back with you to the
acephalous mollusk, first cousin to the clams and mussels, whose
rudimental spine was the hinted prophecy of humanity; all this time never
dreaming, apparently, that what she takes for a matter of curious
speculation involves the whole future of human progress and destiny.
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