638 TRAVEL IN EUROPE AND AMERICA. [1873, 



chance, confide in your dictum that the doctrine of 

 the derivative origin of one species from another can- 

 iiot logically stop short of " blank materialism, de- 

 structive both of science and religion, and even . . . 

 to morals and social organization." 



There will be "a heavy penalty to pay," but there 

 are two sides to the question as to who is to pay a part 

 of it. What I said in the last paragraph of the 

 Dubuque address " we need not here consider " l is, 

 nevertheless, worthy of consideration. 



The time is not very distant, I imagine, when those 

 who have protested against such reckless statements 

 will be thought to have done some service to religion 

 as well as to science. 



I trust that the foundations of theism and of the 

 Christian religion rest upon firmer foundations than 

 the so-called " immutability of species." 



1 " An able philosophical writer, Miss Frances Power Cobbe, has 

 recently and truthfully said : 



" ' It is a singular fact that when we can find out how anything is 

 done, our first conclusion seems to be, God did not do it. No matter 

 how wonderful, how beautiful, how intimately complex and delicate 

 has been the machinery which has worked perhaps for centuries, per- 

 haps for millions of ages, to bring about some beneficent result, if 

 we can but catch a glimpse of the wheels, its divine character disap- 

 pears. ' 



" I agree with the writer that this first conclusion is premature and 

 unworthy, I will add deplorable. Through what faults and infirmi- 

 ties of dogmatism on the one hand, and skepticism on the other, it 

 came to be so thought, we need not here consider. Let us hope, and 

 I confidently expect, that it is not to last ; that the religious faith 

 which survived without a shock the notion of the fixity of the earth 

 itself may equally outlast the notion of the absolute fixity of the 

 species which inhabit it ; that in the future, even more than in the 

 past, faith in an order, which is the basis of science, will not, as it 

 cannot reasonably, be dissevered from faith in an Ordainer, which is 

 the basis of religion." "Sequoia and its History," in Darwiniana, p. 

 205. 



