of the freemen of Rome. It is indeed true that, when men obstinately cherish old abuses, and will not let them be removed in a regular and constitutional way, the providence of God will at last interpose for their violent overthrow by war and revolution. But if they are to be abolished by peaceful legislation, there must be a movement from within the community. Except in the case of provinces which are mere dependencies of large empires, no mere outward force of law will do the work. But such an inward movement implies a much greater degree of illumination and moral elevation than belonged to imperial Rome in the days of the apostles. Great as the Romans were in war and statesmanship, they had no clear idea — we might better say, no idea whatever- of men's rights as men. During the long and bloody conflict of Christianity with pagan Rome, the most enlightened of her emperors failed to recognize the rights of conscience in religious matters. In the words of Neander, the Roman statesman "requires, inasmuch as he looks upon it as a matter of the state, unconditional obedience to the laws of the empire. With the character of the religion he has nothing to do. Whatever that might be, defiance of the imperial laws must be severely punished." 1 To such men a movement on the part of the Christians for the emancipation, in legal form, of the slaves, on the ground of their inalienable rights as men, must have been regarded as inflexible obstinacy and sedition. It would have constituted a new element of opposition to Christianity without any counterbalancing advantage. It was necessary that the gospel should first create a more enlightened and elevated public sentiment before it could be turned (as it was afterwards, with entire success) against slavery as an institution. Meantime the apostles, while they abstained from any interference with slavery, in its outward legal form, introduced into the relation, on both sides, the new law of 'History of the Christian Religion and Church; Torrey's translation, Vol. I. pp. 98, 99, where see the words of Pliny: Neque enim dubitabam, qualecunque esset quod faterentur, pervicaciam certe et inflexibilem obstinationem debere puniri. brotherly love, which, so far as it actually prevailed, emptied this old and selfish system of the main part of its contents, and gradually prepared the way for its outward and formal removal. The proofs that Christianity did thus gradually extinguish slavery as an institution, the reader may find succinctly but very clearly stated in the last of the three Articles of Prof. B. B. Edwards, to which reference has already been made.! And now in these latter days, when, under the guiding hand of Christianity, the principles of civil and religious freedom are slowly but steadily wending their way ainong the nations of the earth; and in this fair republic too, whose foundations were cemented with the richest blood of freemen, and where the principles of freedom, social, ecclesiastical, and personal, have been more discussed, and ought to be better understood, than in any other nation under heaven, here, in these latter days, this demon of discord, that had been once forced down to the pit by the power of the gospel, rises again, bearing in one hand the torch of civil war, and in the other a halter for free speech; steals from the sanctuary, through the ministry of its unfaithful servants, the sacerdotal frontlet of pure gold, inscribed HOLINESS TO THE LORD; binds it with a ribbon of perverted scriptural texts to his own snaky forehead; and then cries out: "I am sacred; let no man touch me!" But the conspiracy will not succeed; for God is on the throne, and he will thrust the demon down again to his own place, though it may not be in any way of our devising 1 Writings of Prof. B. B. Edwards, with a Memoir, Vol. II. pp. 127-130. See also the second Article, pp. 107-112. ARTICLE V. QUATREFAGES AND GODRON IN REPLY TO AGASSIZ ON BY JOSEPH P. THOMPSON, D.D., NEW YORK. It is about twelve years since Professor Agassiz startled Loth the religious and the scientific world with his theory of the multiple origin of mankind, through the creation of different races in distinct zoölogical zones. This theory contradicts the biblical account of the derivation of all men from a single pair, and the distibution of mankind. into communities and nations from a common centre in Western Asia; and therefore its announcement by so eminent a scientist startled the religious world. The theory also contravenes the generally received doctrine of naturalists, that species is defined by lineal descent from a single pair, and supposes multiple protoplasts of one and the same species; therefore it was regarded with surprise and incredulity by the scientific world. The revolutionary bearing of the theory upon the common doctrine of species, is clearly set forth in a recent essay upon "The Origin of Species," by Professor Asa Gray, of Cambridge. "The orthodox conception of species is that of lineal descent; all the descendants of a common parent, and no other, constitute a species; they have a certain identity, because of their descent, by which they are supposed to be recognizable. So naturalists had a distinct idea of what they meant by the term "species," and a practical rule which was hardly the less useful because difficult to apply in many cases, and because its application was indirect, that is, the community of origin had to be inferred from the likeness; that degree of similarity, and that only, being held to be conspecific, which could be shown or reasonably inferred to be compatible with a common origin. And the usual concurrence of the whole body of naturalists (having the same data before them), as to what forms are species, attests the value of the rule, and also indicates some real foundation for it in nature. But if species were created in numberless individuals 1 American Journal of Science and Arts, March 1860. over broad spaces of territory, these individuals are connected only in idea, and species differ from varieties on the one hand, and from genera, tribes, etc., on the other, only in degree; and no obvious natural reason remains for fixing upon this or that degree as specific, at least no natural standard, by which the opinions of different naturalists may be correlated. Species, upon this view, are enduring, but subjective and ideal. Any three or more of the human races, for example, are species, or not species, according to the bent of the naturalist's mind. "The ordinary and generally received view assumes the independent specific creation of each kind of plant and animal in a primitive stock, which reproduces its like from generation to generation, and so continues the species. Taking the idea of species from this perennial succession of essentially similar individuals, the chain is logically traceable back to a local origin in a single stock, a single pair, or a single individual, from which all the individuals composing the species have proceeded by natural generation...... From this generally accepted view the theory of Agassiz differs fundamentally in this, that it discards the idea of a common descent as the real bond of union among the individuals of a species, and also the idea of a local origin,—supposing, instead, that each species originated simultaneously, generally speaking, over the whole geographical area it now occupies or has occupied, and in perhaps as many individuals as it numbered at any subsequent period." Professor Agassiz broached this theory, in this country, first through the pages of the Christian Examiner, for March and July, 1850; and afterwards in 1854, in an essay on "The Natural Provinces of the Animal World, and their Relation to the Different Types of Man," published in the volume of Nott and Gliddon, entitled "Types of Mankind," the Cambridge Professor having unwittingly allowed his name to be associated with two of the veriest charlatans that ever sought to impose upon the ignorance and credulity of the public with "science falsely so-called." The object of this essay, as defined by its author, is "to show that the boundaries within which the different natural combinations of animals are known to be circumscribed upon the surface of our earth, coincide with the natural range of distinct types of man." Regarding the local circumscription of faunae, with the special adaptations of each fauna to its zoölogical zone, as proof that every such zone was a distinct centre of creation, Professor Agassiz argues that "the laws which regulate the diversity of animals, and their distribution upon the earth, apply equally to man, within the same limits and in the same degree;" and in view of such alleged facts, he insists upon "the probability of an independence of origin of all nations; or, at least, of the independent origin of a primitive stock for each, with which at some future period migrating or conquering tribes have more or less completely amalgamated, as in the case of mixed nationalities." Yet the essay also maintains that the unity of mankind is compatible with such diversity of origin, since unity is determinal by a typical structure, and by the similarity of natural abilities and propensities.” The following extracts from the Christian Examiner for July, 1850, more fully define his view: "The circumstance that, wherever we find a human race naturally circumscribed, it is connected in its limitation with what we call, in natural history, a zoological and botanical province, that is to say, with the natural limitation of a particular association of animals and plants, shows most unequivocally the intimate relation existing between mankind and the animal kingdom in their adaptation to the physical world. The arctic race of men, covering the treeless region near the Arctics in Europe, Asia, and America, is circumscribed in the three continents within limits very similar to those occupied by that particular combination of animals which are peculiar to the same tracts of land and sea. . . . . . Such identical circumscriptions between the limits of two series of organized beings so widely differing as man and animals and plants, and so entirely unconnected in point of descent, would, to the mind of a naturalist, amount to a demonstration that they originated together within the districts which they now inhabit. We say that such an accumulation of evidence would amount to demonstration; for how could it, on the contrary, be supposed that man alone would assume new peculiarities, and features so different from his primitive characteristics, whilst the animals and plants circumscribed within the same limits would continue to preserve their natural relations to the fauna and flora of other parts of the world? "If the creator of one set of these living beings had not been also the creator of the other, and if we did not trace the same general laws throughout nature, there might be room left for the supposition that, while men inhabiting different parts of the world originated from a common centre, the plants and animals now associated with them in the same countries originated on the spot. But such inconsistencies do not occur in the laws of nature. "The coincidence of the geographical distribution of the human races with that of animals, the disconnection of the climatic conditions where we |