These propagandists have had such a degree of success in attracting public attention, in inspiring a large proportion of the secular press, besides scientific journals, as advocates of their notions, and in obtaining entrance for them into the common school books, put into the hands of our children, and into massive quartos published by State legislatures with the money of Christian people, and in the prevalent corruption of public morals and breach of private trusts necessarily resulting from the evolution of these principles, that we are compelled, in self-defense, to examine the doctrine of evolution.

It is all very well for Mr.Tyndall to warn off everybody, but evolutionists, from any investigations into cosmogony; about which he owns that they know very little now, and will not know much for some millions of years to come.
But common people, who will not live so long, but who in the meantime have to live and make money, and save it, who have children to rear, and houses which they do not want burned over their heads, who have taxes to pay, increasing every year, and public plunderers to prosecute and whose ballots may be asked one of these days for the substitution of the communes of the original apes, and the Red Republic for these United States, all upon the alleged scientific proof for the truth of the doctrine of evolution, and the consequent abolishment of Christianity--common people, I maintain, by whose money and votes this dogma is to be established, will not be debarred from asking the why and the wherefore, neither by Mr.Tyndall, nor by any other scientific pope.
It is a little too late in the day for men who do not know their own mind from the Alps to Belfast, and who doubt whether God made them whenever they are dyspeptic, to stand up before the public demanding that we shut our eyes and open our mouths, and swallow every preposterous notion they think proper to proclaim as science, to the destruction of our faith in the God who made us, of our respect for our brethren of mankind, and of our hope of heaven.
_II.

The Illogical Structure of the Theory._ When men come before the world with a dogma freighted with such wide-reaching revolutions, they ought to be prepared to furnish the most irrefragable proofs of its truth, and of its obligation and authority.
We should be able to establish it beyond all controversy as based on a series of facts which take their place historically in the line of the inductive sciences; about which all men of science are agreed, as all astronomers, for instance, are agreed about gravitation; and we should be able to show that each of the alleged consequences flows inevitably and logically from these established facts.

Ignorance, hypothesis, assumption of facts, sophisms, begging the question, and the like, are wholly impertinent in any such discussion.

Were they even tolerable in the field of metaphysical discussion, they must, by the rules of the Positive Philosophy itself, banishing all but ascertained facts from the halls of science, be excluded from this discussion of an alleged general law of nature.