I suppose we are more lenient with human nature than theologians
generally are. We know that the spirits of men and their views of the
present and the future go up and down with the barometer, and that a
permanent depression of one inch in the mercurial column would affect the
whole theology of Christendom.
"Ministers talk about the human will as if it stood on a high look-out,
with plenty of light, and elbowroom reaching to the horizon. Doctors are
constantly noticing how it is tied up and darkened by inferior
organization, by disease, and all sorts of crowding interferences, until
they get to look upon Hottentots and Indians--and a good many of their
own race as a kind of self-conscious blood-clocks with very limited power
of self-determination. That's the tendency, I say, of a doctor's
experience. But the people to whom they address their statements of the
results of their observation belong to the thinking class of the highest
races, and they are conscious of a great deal of liberty of will. So in
the face of the fact that civilization with all it offers has proved a
dead failure with the aboriginal races of this country,--on the whole, I
say, a dead failure,--they talk as if they knew from their own will all
about that of a Digger Indian! We are more apt to go by observation of
the facts in the case.
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