The foregoing is only one instance of the many that could be cited where science has schemed projects for universal progress without due thought, and has come to the conclusion that they could be easily carried out. There are as many examples of this jumping at conclusions as would fill many books, which of course it is not our purpose to do; but there is one that it is necessary to have brought forward for examination, because of its having, through a most incomprehensible want of thought, a tendency to establish Natural Religion on the very bases upon which the Christian Religion is established.
The one referred to is that by which some of the most eminent scientists of the present century, following up what was done in former times, have been able by deep study and experiment, unfortunately coupled with unaccountable blindness or preconceived erroneous ideas, to formulate processes by which the whole universe may have elaborated itself from protyle and protoplasm, or some such substances which, without any foundation to build upon, they suppose to have existed from all eternity. This advance in science has been called the Theory of Evolution, and has been very generally considered to be new, or of comparatively very recent conception; but it is only a piece of the evidence of a very general propensity in those who come to acquire a little more knowledge, to flatter themselves that they have power to seize hold of the Unknown.
The theory may be _new_, but evolution most assuredly is not, as any one may convince himself who will take the trouble to read the first chapter of the Book of Genesis _and to think_. There he will find it stated that the earth and all things in it and on it were created and made in six days, or periods of time, showing him distinctly, if he does not shut his eyes wilfully, that two operations were employed in the process, one of creation and the other of making, which last can mean nothing but _evolution_. It does not matter a straw whether the latter operation was carried on personally by the Creator and Maker, or under the power of laws ordained by Him for the purpose; it was evolution all the same, and just the kind of evolution the scientists above alluded to would have us believe to be new, not far from 3500 years after the account of the creation and making of the world was written by Moses.