The question of our future destiny is paramount to all others in
dignity and importance. Upon this subject all wise men must have clear
and positive views. The editor of the _Christian Register_ of Boston,
according to the very common idea that men in prominent positions as
professors and decorated with college honors must be the wisest,
thought it well to ask them if science could take cognizance of the
question of immortality, and if its verdict was for or against a
future life. Such questions he addressed to twenty-three professors,
presidents, doctors of laws, etc. But he did not reflect that there
were several hundred gentlemen in Boston who had more knowledge on
this subject, and who could give him positive and reliable
information, and he entirely forgot that the only scientist who has
examined this question from the physiological standpoint resides in
Boston.
The editor did not obtain what he was ostensibly seeking, but he did
obtain an amount of evidence of ignorance, in high places, which I
should be happy to record, but for the fact that it would occupy more
than half of one number of the JOURNAL OF MAN. Nevertheless, I cannot
deprive my readers of the pleasure and amusement derived from this
correspondence. I have condensed the responses into a readable compass
leaving out their useless verbiage, and putting them in a poetic form,
as poetry best expresses the essence and spirit of an author's
thought. I think the learned gentlemen, if they could peruse these
doggerel rhymes, would acknowledge that their meaning has been
expressed even more plainly and forcibly than in their own prose. The
reader will observe that of the whole twenty-three only two appear to
have any knowledge on the subject, the famous A. R. Wallace and the
brilliant Dr. Coues. The following is the essence or rather
quintessence of the voluminous responses in the order in which they
were published. The learned gentlemen ought to feel grateful for the
increased candor, brevity and explicitness of their replies, when
boiled down into the rhyming form, bringing out new beauties which
were not apparent in the original nebulous condition of vagueness in
which some of them disclaim opposition to immortality, while their
only immortality is that of atoms and force.
While there is something amusing in these responses (which I shall
carefully file away for the future), which may furnish matter for
surprise and laughter in a more enlightened age, and which may cause
the writers, if they live long enough, to realize a feeling of shame
for the wilful ignorance or affectation of ignorance displayed, we
cannot overlook the very serious fact that the educational leadership
of our country is in the hands of men of whom a large proportion are
destitute of the very foundation of the sentiment of religion, while
another large portion are so utterly regardless of scientific truth as
to ignore the best attested facts, which are continually in progress
within their reach--a degree of bigotry which is not surpassed in the
history of the "Dark Ages." Verily the shadow of those ages rests upon
the leading institutions of to-day.