Religious by Roswell F. Cottrell

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jul 4, 1878

"Religious."

By Roswell F. Cottrell

Under this heading the New York Weekly Herald gives from week to week a variety of short paragraphs, many of which it would puzzle most readers to discover what bearing they have on the subject of religion. The following ironical hit upon modern scientists however conveys a religious moral. R. F. C.

"Science manages to get us into a terrible muddle. Darwin tells us that we have been gradually and with great difficulty evolved from that greatest boon of mankind known as the baboon. Mr. Haeckel informs us that this baboon is the result of spontaneous generation, or fermentation or something of that sort. And when we ask whence came the original seeds or spores which fermented and produced Darwin, Thomson asserts that they came to the earth in the tail of some comet, or hidden in the heart of an aerolite, like a frog in granite, and that thus the machinery of life got its start. It is perfectly easy to believe all this, because it is so reasonable; and besides that, it is the result of the exact sciences. We had just made up our new creed, 'In the beginning there was an animalcule, and after that Huxley and Tyndall,' and had just got our lips ready to pooh! pooh! at Jonah and Moses, when another man of research comes along, and after holding several interviews with a favorite ourang outang declares positively that if that quadrumane was ever 'on the route to make a man of himself he somehow got switched off the track long ago.' Now, then, what are we to do? We feel like the babes in the woods when night comes on. One scientist says, 'May be we did;' and another answers, 'May be we didn't.' Well there's nothing like being scientific if you want to be perfectly sure of things."