“Your great mistake,” said he to me one day, when the subject came up, “is in supposing that religion is the offspring of ignorance, and stands opposed to science. Your assumption that man began in ignorance, and has attained to science only by long and patient research and laborious experiment, is at best gratuitous. Some things, of course, have been acquired only in process of time. Man has made progress in the knowledge of all that which he himself has done, or has suffered; but nothing requires you to assume that his progress in knowledge is any thing more than progress in the knowledge of his own doing and suffering. It is not likely that Adam knew the history of the battle of Pharsalia, of Hastings, Bovines, or Waterloo; it is not probable that he was acquainted with the steam-engine, the cotton-gin, the spinning-jenny, the power-loom, or the lightning telegraph. But he may have received from his Maker, as religion teaches, a knowledge of the nature and causes of things, and of his moral relations and duties, equal to that possessed by the most enlightened of his posterity. “Historically considered,” proceeded Mr. Merton, “the earliest belief of mankind was the existence, unity, and free providence of God—a belief in strict accordance with the deductions of genuine science in every age. Every language under heaven bears indelible traces of that belief, and would be unintelligible, absolutely insignificant, if it were denied. Yet all languages are radically one and the same, and must, in some form, have been given supernaturally to man, for man speaks only as he has learned to speak; and it would have required language to invent language.” “But if all languages are radically the same, how do you explain their manifest differences?” I asked. “That is a question which I leave to the philologists; but they, I believe, very easily prove that these differences are not radical, and that they are due principally to the differences of pursuits, of circumstances, temperaments, and pronunciation of different tribes having little or no intercourse with one another. However great or small they may be, or whatever their causes, it has been proved that they are only modifications of one and the same original tongue.” “But you know,” said I, “that religion is progressive, and that the earliest religion of mankind was a gross fetichism, a worship of animals and inanimate things. From that gross superstition we can trace its gradual purification and progress towards the sublime monotheism of Moses, Socrates, Plato, and Jesus, moulded by the Church fathers into Christian theology.”