● ● ●  and Melville met and looked together into the dark, Hawthorne with sad austerity, Melville with passionate rebellion. The problem of evil hangs over The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick like the thunderclouds over Mount Greylock. Mrs. Glover may not have known the works of either of them at the time, but the same thunderclouds hung over Sanbornton Bridge.

Harriet Beecher Stowe reduced the problem to the simplest terms in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Under the lash of Simon Legree, Uncle Tom is confronted with the question, “Is God here?”

Mrs. Stowe’s answer was the conventional one of reward in a future heaven. In a curious way the same answer turned up in the new science blowing from across the Atlantic. The “development” theory, as evolution was then called, was itself developing toward Darwin. The anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was more than a seven-days’ wonder in England and America.¹²³ Cosmic fantasy rather than sober science, it yet made brilliant guesses and popularized useful concepts, rousing the ire of theologian and scientist alike—the work of a nineteenth-century Velikovsky who happened to be looking in the right direction.

A copy of the book quickly found its way into George Baker’s library.¹²⁴ The problem involved in its new cosmology—the same that darkened the old theology—was made explicit by the author: