Polly was neither proud nor happy
while this went on, and let the children romp unchecked. At present it
was not so much the welfare of her husband's soul she feared for: God
must surely know by this time what a good man Richard was; he had not
his equal, she thought, for honesty and uprightness; he was kind to the
poor and the sick, and hadn't missed a single Sunday at church, since
their marriage. But all that would not help, if once he got the
reputation of being an infidel. Then, nobody would want him as a doctor
at all.
Casually begun, Mahony's studies soon absorbed him to the exclusion of
everything else.
Brought up in the cast-iron mould of Irish Protestantism, to which,
being of a sober and devout turn of mind, he had readily submitted, he
had been tossed, as a youthful student, into the freebooting Edinburgh
of the forties. Edinburgh was alive in those days to her very
paving-stones; town and university combined to form a hotbed of
intellectual unrest, a breeding-ground for disturbing possibilities. The
"development theory" was in the air; and a book that appeared anonymously
had boldly voiced, in popular fashion, Maillet's dream and the Lamarckian
hypothesis of a Creation undertaken once and for all, in place of a
continuous creative intenention. This book, opposing natural law to
miracle, carried complete conviction to the young and eager. Audacious
spirits even hazarded the conjecture that primitive life itself might
have originated in a natural way: had not, but recently, an investigator
who brought a powerful voltaic battery to bear on a saturated solution
of silicate of potash, been startled to find, as the result of his
experiment, numberless small mites of the species ACARUS HORRIDUS? Might
not the marvel electricity or galvanism, in action on albumen, turn out
to be the vitalising force? To the orthodox zoologist, phytologist and
geologist, such a suggestion savoured of madness; they either took
refuge in a contemptuous silence, or condescended only to reply: Had one
visited the Garden of Eden during Creation, one would have found that,
in the morning, man was not, while in the evening he was!--morning and
evening bearing their newly established significance of geological
epochs.
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