DARWINISM AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 323 



It was not so much what was stated, as the obvious implications 

 of the doctrine, which men shrank from. Darwin, who had noth- 

 ing of the defiant arrogance of some who speak in his name, was 

 even accused of dishonesty in not clearly stating at the outset the 

 hearing of the doctrine on man. And his volume on " The Descent 

 of Man " was his answer to the charge. But his letters show how 

 fully he realized the consequences of his theory from the first : 



I am deeply convinced [he wrote to Lyell, while revising the proof-sheets of 

 the " Origin "] that it is absolutely necessary to go the whole vast length, or stick 

 to the creation of each separate species.* ... I can see no possible means of 

 drawing the line and saying, Here yon must stop.t ... I believe man is in the 

 same predicament with other animals. It is, in fact, impossible to doubt it.J 



For the scientific acceptance of the theory, as Darwin says, " ce 

 n'est que le premier pas qui coute,"* but for people generally, who 

 judge a theory by its consequences, not on its evidence, it is, as he 

 says of Carpenter, " the last mouthful that chokes." || Of course, 

 as he admits, it is open to every one to believe that man appeared 

 by a separate miracle,"^ but to hold the doctrine of special creation 

 here and here only is to ignore the arguments which, ex hypotliesi, 

 carried conviction everywhere else. 



It was on this point that Darwin and Wallace parted company, 

 though the divergence is commonly represented as far greater 

 than it was. Wallace admitted the evolution of man out of a 

 lower form, but contends, and this was what he calls his "heresy," 

 that natural selection would have only given man a brain a little 

 superior to that of an ape, whereas it is greatly superior. He 

 therefore contrasts "man" with the "unaided productions" of 

 Nature, and argues that, as in artificial selection, man supervenes 

 and uses the law of natural selection to produce a desired result, 

 so " a higher intelligence " may have supervened, and used the law 

 of natural selection to produce man. Whether from the scientific 

 side this is rightly called a " heresy " or not it is not necessary to 

 decide ; but certainly, from the religious side, it has a strangely 

 unorthodox look. If, as a Christian believes, the " higher intelli- 

 gence " who used these laws for the creation of man was the same 

 God who worked in and by these same laws in creating the lower 

 forms of life, Mr. Wallace's distinction, as a distinction of cause, 

 disappears ; and if it was not the same God, we contradict the first 

 article of the Creed. Whatever be the line which Christianity 

 draws between man and the rest of the visible creation, it certainly 

 does not claim man as the work of God, and leave the rest to " un- 

 aided Nature." 



We have then to face the question, If it be true that man, " as 



* " Life and Letters," i, p. 619. f i, p. 626. % "» P- S^- 



* [It is only the first step that costs.] ii, p. 30. \ ii, p. 35. ^ ii, p. 68. 



