IS DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS SUFFICIENT? 87 



of timid Christians, and the rising rage of polemic theologians, have 

 been disappointed. But an interest has been excited in the subject of 

 development. In the present state of the public mind, good may arise 

 from showing that when the doctrine of development is properly ex- 

 plained and understood, and kept within its legitimate sphere, there is 

 nothing in it inconsistent with natural or revealed religion ; and that 

 the scientific truths which Prof. Huxley has expounded in these lect- 

 ures do not entitle him to draw the consequences which he has done 

 in his " Lay Sermons " and other writings. 



In his first lecture the professor had light work and an easy vic- 

 tory. He set up two targets and shot them down. He stated and 

 overwhelmed two hypotheses : the first, that Nature has been all along 

 very much in the same state as it now is ; and the second, the poeti- 

 cal account given by Milton in " Paradise Lost." It did not need 

 an Englishman to come 3,000 miles, it did not require a man of Prof. 

 Huxley's knowledge and dialectic skill, to demolish these fancies. I 

 cannot remember a single man eminent in science, philosophy, or 

 theology, defending either of these views during the last half-century. 

 The first hypothesis was never held by religious men, though it has 

 been defended by a few scientific men who might have been kept 

 from error by looking to Scripture such as Hutton, Playfair, and 

 Lyell in his earlier writings. The book of Genesis speaks of an order 

 and a progression in the origination of things and of a flood covering 

 the then peopled earth. I should not expect any one but a Don Quixote 

 to attack Milton's exposition of a popular belief. The view given in 

 " Paradise Lost " was not the one entertained by several of the most 

 eminent of the Christian fathers, such as Origen, and has not been 

 entertained by any theologian of ability and scholarship for the last 

 age or two. It must now be forty or fifty years since Chalmers and 

 Pye Smith and certain well-known divines of the Church of England, 

 and President Hitchcock of Amherst, adopted the discoveries of geol- 

 ogy and sought to reconcile them with Scripture. It is an instructive 

 circumstance that, while Milton's account cannot stand a moment's in- 

 vestigation, the record in Genesis is believed by many of our highest 

 men of science to be perfectly consistent with the latest science. I 

 name only Prof. Dana, Prof. Guyot, and Principal Dawson, the highest 

 authorities on this continent, and superior to Prof. Huxley, not cer- 

 tainly in zoology, but in geology. I am quite ready to give up these 

 two hypotheses to Prof. Huxley, to hew and hack them (to use one of 

 his own phrases) like Agag. 



The second lecture is written in his best manner. There is scarce- 

 ly anything in it that I am inclined to object to. He is no longer kill- 

 ing hypotheses which died a natural death long ago. He is arranging 

 his materials for the defense of the theory of Evolution. He has as 

 yet only brought forward the cases which he acknowledges are not 

 demonstrative of the truth of evolution, but are such as must exist if 



