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PREFACE.

"Being an author of distinction, and a literary man of experience and superior judgment and taste, it is not surprising that Mr. Thorne gives us, every three months, so admirable and comprehensive a review of the several important fields which he has chosen to investigate. The number issued October 1st is brim-ming over with "good things," and will be greatly enjoyed by readers who appreciate the best in composition and the noblest thought of the human mind. We have no better Quarterly published in the country than THE GLOBE."-Commercial List and Price-Current, Philadelphia.

THE GLOBE.

NO. IX.

MAY, 1892.

THE VAGARIES OF MODERN THOUGHT.

WHEN Carlyle, in speaking of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican Church, once asked, with characteristic indignation"Did the Almighty make his universe by you then?"-he expressed in a line the average attitude of the scientific intelligence of the nineteenth century toward orthodox Christian theology; and when, time and again, he laughed to scorn his own putting of the Darwinian theory, that the human race had grown from "frog-spawn," he uttered, in one word, the whole mind of Christendom toward the gospel of evolution as preached and accepted by the science of our time. Perhaps he was half right, and that both of our received infallible creeds are half wrong.

The very greatest minds of the nineteenth century-Bismarck, Hugo, Carlyle, Ruskin, Emerson, Phillips-though as free-minded as angels or devils, and open to all sorts of convictions, would nevertheless have fallen to sleep or to cursing over the best pages in the works of Darwin or Spencer, or they might have read the same to find out what fools these scientific mortals be. Eagles do not like to be caged, are apt to beat their wings or your cages to pieces if you cage them. So "Mother Goose for Old Folks" embraces us all in saying or singing, "Chain up a child, and away he will go." Chains and creeds are for slaves.

The expressed indignation referred to is not peculiar to Carlyle. Mr. Ruskin burns to white heat in dealing with the scientific botonists who cover the flowers of God's world with a contemptible

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