We are inclined to think that great injustice has been done the development theory in the name of morals and religion. There has been no end to the railing against it on the part of clergymen, Biblical interpreters, theological Professors, and orthodox editors. It was held to put infinite dishonor upon the Creator, not only to suppose that He should take many millions of years to make a world, but that He should employ the same lengthened period to make man, instead of speaking him into existence by a word. It was held to put infinite dishonor upon the Scriptures to suppose that they should be understood in any but the most literal sense. And it was held to put infinite dishonor upon man to suppose that he was kith and kin with the monkey--bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of the unreasoning quadrupeds, over which in his god-like royalty he was to sway his imperial sceptre--and this, too, by a class of teachers who could never have enough of thundering in the ears of men their degradation, their lost, debased, insensate, and damnable condition, worse than that of beasts or devils. Now, with all deference, we beg to say that this development theory does not strike us as so fraught with dishonor, either to the powers in heaven or the beings upon earth. It has for many years impressed us with its grandeur as an intellectual conception. We doubt whether anything so grand has dawned upon the mind of modern civilization since the days of Sir Isaac Newton. And we cannot see what dishonor it can work to either God or man--especially if it be proved to be true. We regard it, so far as there is truth in it, as one of those great germinant seed-thoughts, which at long intervals are dropped into the soil of the human mind; and though the mind of the age, in its first impulses of joy, may play wild gambols with it, it is destined in the end to mould and control the thinking of the civilized world. But apart from its truth or falsity, in whole or in part, regarded simply _as an intellection_, it strikes us as one of the grandest of modern times. Spreading itself over almost illimitable space, grasping back through almost illimitable time, claiming for itself the boundless multiplicity of type, and form, and life, and law of the organic world, and unfolding to the wondering gaze the vast prophetic possibilities of the future, it possesses all the attributes of grandeur, magnificence, sublimity, and mystery. If it is a phantasm, it is more gorgeous than the most splendid creations of poetry. If it is a mirage, it is more beautiful than any that ever bewildered the vision of enchanted traveller. If it is an _ignis fatuus_, it is more potent than any ever raised by the spell of the sorcerer. But whether phantasm, mirage, _ignis fatuus_, or sober but grand reality, will assuredly be found out by science before another half century. And the ultimate finding of science, whatever it may be, must and will be believed.