FICTION
203
eloquently spake, was funded, I think wholly, by that august
organization, the Sons of America Protective Association, to which
numerous of our Princeton families either belonged, or contributed,
it cannot, I think, be seriously claimed, that the Princetonians were
o'er-conservative in their distrust of Science; or opposed, in any
absolute way, to scientific research and experimentation. (Provided,
of course, that it did not violate certain bounds of common
decency,-the which the shrill-voiced female suffragists· daily
transgressed, in those years, with their shameless public clamor for
contraceptive devices, abortion, and even "free" love-!) When the
revered Dr. Charles Hodge, head of the Princeton Theological
Seminary, made the proud statement for which he is known to this
day, as to his fearlessness, in declaring that a "new idea had never
originated in
his
seminary," he was addressing himself to the Science
of Theology, and not to the Science of Man; for the devout old soul
conceived of Theology as an orderly statement of what the Holy
Book
says,-and
not what hot-headed young fools think it
means.
This seems to me reasonable enough, for the Seminary was, in those
tumultuous years, engaged in grave warfare, with the notorious
liberals of the Union Theological Seminary; and had to guard itself
against unprovok'd attacks, by those theologians who fancied
"Biblical criticism," -and wished to enforce unneeded reforms,
upon the Presbyterian Church. (Nay, it is very unlikely, that any
fair-minded person would believe the Seminary to have been in
error, in its pursuit of divers heresy and blasphemy charges, against
certain
0'
erly vocal members of the clergy: for the reader has but to
glance about him, at the loathsome black tide of change, to which
the atheistical Darwinists and their ilk have brought us!) Yet, even
so, Dr. Hodge was not so adamantly conservative, and so opposed to
all forms of "progress," as to refuse to donate sums of money, to
organizations of the scope, ambition, and daring, of the Sons of
America Protective Association.
(This worthy organization, to which, I should here note, some
two or three of my own ancestors belonged, was founded in 1889,
out of a heroic response to the accelerated fear, on the part of
the favored races, of being o'ercome by the
swarthy tide,
of the too–
prolific races,-the which, I need not sully my text, by here
naming. Dr. Slade, Dr. Patton, Dr. Wilson, Dr. FitzRandolph, and
many another concerned citizen, up to Mr. Roosevelt himself, and
'Or "suffragettes," as they call themselves oflate.
