152 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tendencies of the Darwinian theory were " toward infidelity/' but 

 declined to make any serious battle on biblical grounds; the 

 Jesuit, Father Pesch, in Holland, drew. up in Latin in due array, 

 after the old scholastic manner, a sort of general indictment of 

 evolution, of which one must say that it was interesting as inter- 

 esting as the display of a troop in chain armor and with cross- 

 bows on a nineteenth-century battlefield. 



From America there came new echoes. Among the myriad 

 attacks on the Darwinian theory by Catholics and Protestants 

 two should be especially mentioned. The first of these was by 

 Dr. Noah Porter, President of Yale College, an excellent scholar, 

 an interesting writer, a noble man, broadly tolerant, combining 

 in his thinking a curious mixture of radicalism and conservatism. 

 While giving great latitude to the evolutionary teaching in the 

 university under his care, he felt it his duty upon one occasion to 

 avow his disbelief in it ; but he was very careful not to suggest 

 any necessary antagonism between it and the Scriptures. He 

 confined himself mainly to pointing out the tendency of the evo- 

 lution doctrine in this form toward agnosticism and pantheism. 

 To those who knew and loved him and had noted the genial way 

 in which by wise neglect he had allowed scientific studies to flour- 

 ish at Yale, there was an amusing side to all this. Within a 

 stone's throw of his college rooms was the Museum of Paleon- 

 tology, in which Prof. Marsh had laid side by side, among other 

 evidences of the new truth, that wonderful series of specimens 

 showing the evolution of the horse from the earliest form of the 

 animal, " not larger than a fox, with five toes," through the whole 

 series up to his present form and size that series which the most 

 eminent living exponent of the Darwinian view has declared an 

 absolute proof of the existence of natural selection as an agent in 

 evolution. In spite of the veneration and love which all Yale 

 men felt for President Porter, it was hardly to be expected that 

 these particular arguments of his would have much permanent 

 effect upon them when there was constantly before their eyes so 

 convincing a refutation. 



But a far more determined and bitter opponent was the Rev. 

 Dr. Hodge, of Princeton; his anger toward the evolution doctrine 

 seemed to madden him : he declared it thoroughly " atheistic " ; 

 he insisted that Christians " have a right to protest against the 

 arraying of probabilities against the clear evidence of the Scrip- 

 tures " ; he even censured so orthodox a writer as the Duke of 

 Argyll, and declared that the Darwinian theory of natural selec- 

 tion is " utterly inconsistent with the Scriptures," and that " an 

 absent God, who does nothing, is to us no God " ; that " to ignore 

 design as manifested in God's creation is a theory which attempts 

 to dethrone God " ; that " a denial of design in Nature is virtually 



