CHARLES DARWIN. 89 



fluctuations, been an Atheist; the term 'Agnostic' (in the sense 

 of being unable to comprehend God) comes nearer to defining my 

 position, and that only at times, but more so as I grow older." 



He has solved the problem now ! And who dares to say that 

 he is not at rest with the Master, the Creator of the worlds whose 

 wondrous potentialities and forces he so loved to study and think 

 of, alone with God ! 



And yet of this man such lines as the following are written in 

 1883 in sober earnest : — 



" Darwin believes man but a beast, 



Sprung from a lowly root ; 

 Superior to frogs and apes — 



A highly-cultured shoot ; 

 Forerunner of a higher race — 



But not what Scripture states, 

 Possessed with an immortal soul ; 



On minds like his that grates." 



Who gave Miss Georgiana Farrar, the author of the above and 

 of some six or seven thousand other verses, authority to state that 

 Darwin disbeUeved in an immortal soul ? If she possessed a 

 fraction, infinitesimally small, of the mind she sneers at, she 

 would have spared the much-enduring public the infliction of such 

 unmitigated twaddle, and her pubhshers the probable loss on the 

 first and (let us hope) only edition of her poems. 



Moreover, we hear of a " Society for the Suppression of 

 Blasphemous Literature," and funds are being collected to prose- 

 cute Messrs. Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer, Argyll, Lubbock, and 

 Martineau for their blasphemies, Darwin being omitted only 

 because he has passed from human grasp. How strangely true is 

 it that religious fanaticism does sometimes border on insanity ! 



While Darwin lived, patiently watching in his peaceful Kentish 

 home, the birds, insects, and worms, the flowers, trees, and fields, 

 that all had voices for him, laboriously, carefully, cautiously, 

 through all those years gathering up his facts, uttering no word 

 concerning any of them until anticipation had become certainty, 

 the critics were busy all around him ; Exeter Hall rang with pro- 

 testations against him and all his works, as if he were the very 

 "Anti-Christ" incarnate, and his Origin of Species^ the result 



