ch. in.] RELIGION. 61 



ligion, and he had, as a rule, no objection to doing so in a 

 private letter. Thus, in answer to a Dutch student, he 

 wrote (April 2, 1873) : 



" I am sure you will excuse my writing at length, when 

 I tell you that 1 have long been much out of health, and 

 am now staying away from my home for rest. 



" It is impossible to answer your question briefly ; and I 

 am not sure that I could do so, even if I wrote at some 

 length. But I may say that the impossibility of conceiving 

 that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious 

 selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argu- 

 ment for the existence of God ; but whether this is an argu- 

 ment of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am 

 aware that if we admit a First Cause, the mind still craves 

 to know whence it came and how it arose. Xor can I over- 

 look the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering 

 through the world. I am, also, induced to defer to a certain 

 extent to the judgment of the many able men who have 

 fully believed in God ; but here again I see how poor an 

 argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to me that 

 the whole subject is beyond the scope of man s intellect ; 

 but man can do his duty." 



Again in 1879 he was applied to by a German student, 

 in a similar manner. The letter was answered by a member 

 of my father's family, who wrote : 



"Mr. Darwin bes:s me to say that he receives so many 

 letters, that he cannot answer them all. 



" He considers that the theory of Evolution is quite 

 compatible with the belief in a God ; but that you must 

 remember that different persons have different definitions 

 of what they mean by God." 



This, however, did not satisfy the German youth, who 

 again wrote to my father, and received from him the follow- 

 ing reply : 



" I am much engaged, an old man, and out of health, 

 and I cannot spare time to answer your questions fully, 

 nor indeed can they be answered. Science has nothing to 

 do with Christ, except in so far as the habit of scientific 

 research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For 

 myself, I do not believe that there ever has been any re vela- 

 tion. As for a future life, every man must judge for him- 

 self between conflicting vague probabilities." 



The passages which here follow are extracts, somewhat 

 abbreviated, from a part of the Autobiography, written in 



