young, had sons by the partner of his life and pressed them to his
heart; that monkey--what shall we say of it? What climate, what soil,
what regimen, what food, what heat, what moisture, what drought, what
light, what combination of phosphorus, what disengagement of
electricity, separated from the animal races, not only man, but human
society? humanity with its combats, its falls, its risings again, its
sorrows and its joys, its tears and its smiles; humanity with its arts,
its sciences, its religion, its history in short, its history and its
hopes of immortality? That monkey, what shall we say of it? Do you not
see that the breath of the Spirit passed over it, and that God said unto
it: Behold, thou art made in mine image: remember now thy Father who is
in heaven? Do you not see that though we grant everything to the extreme
pretensions of naturalists, the question comes up again whole and
entire? When by dint of confusions and sophisms such theorists imagine
that they have extinguished the intelligence which radiates from nature,
that intelligence again confronts them in man, and there, as in an
impregnable fortress, sets all attacks at defiance. Mark then where lies
the real problem. Whether the eternal God formed the body of the first
man directly from the dust of the earth; or whether, in the slow series
of ages, He formed the body of the first man of the dust of the earth,
by making it pass through the long series of animality--the question is
a grave one, but it is of secondary importance. The first question is to
know whether we are merely the ephemeral product of the encounter of
atoms, or whether there is in us an essence, a nature, a soul, a reality
in short, with which may connect itself another future than the
dissolution of the sepulchre; whether there remains another hope than
annihilation as the term of our latest sorrows, or, for the aspirants
after fame, only that evanescent memory which time bears away with
everything beside.