DARWINISM AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH. 329 



of Ms position. There was a time when men dared to say that 

 because the presence of sin veils the knowledge of God, therefore 

 they who do not accept Christianity in a Christian country must 

 be guilty of secret, if not open, sin. That phase, thank God, has 

 passed. And then — that men might have a theory — they talked 

 of intellectual pride. Intellectual pride, which is self-assertion, no 

 doubt obscures the vision of God. It is as much a rejection of 

 God as a sinful life is. But dare any one say that loss of faith 

 or the inability to receive it must spring from one of these two 

 causes — immorality or intellectual pride ? We believe it is im- 

 possible to read Darwin's " Life and Letters " without noticing as 

 the most striking characteristics of Darwin's mind his intense 

 modesty, his self-forgetfulness, his shrinking from popularity or 

 applause, while gladly welcoming the testimony of those who 

 were competent to judge of the truth of his work, his devotion 

 to truth as shown by the weight he gave to unfavorable facts, his 

 humility, his simplicity, his reverence. How could such a lovable 

 nature, we are tempted to ask, have rejected Christianity ? or, to 

 put it differently, how could Christianity have failed to make 

 good its appeal to such a nature as this ? 



In the whole record there is nothing so intensely interesting 

 as Darwin's account of his religious opinions and the steps by 

 which he became an agnostic. What was his religious history ? 

 His mother was a Unitarian, his father he describes as " a free- 

 thinker in religious matters," though nominally belonging to the 

 Church of England. Darwin himself was christened and was 

 meant to belong to the Church, but he was sent to a day-school 

 kept by the Unitarian minister. His mother attended the Uni- 

 tarian chapel and took her sons with her. She died when he was 

 eight years old, and after that he seems to have gone to church, 

 and later on we hear of his intention of " going into the Church " * 

 — an intention which was not abandoned till the Beagle voyage. 

 His view of the ministry is incidentally given in a letter from 

 Lima in 1835 : " To a person fit to take the office the life of a 

 clergyman is a type of all that is respectable and happy." f Dur- 

 ing all this period he " had not thought much about the existence 

 of a personal God." % He had read Paley, but had taken Paley's 

 premises "on trust,"* so that even his Unitarianism, which, as 

 he tells us, his grandfather spoke of as " a feather-bed for a falling 

 Christian," was hardly enough to break the fall. Under such con- 

 ditions we are not surprised to hear that the intention to be a 

 clergyman " died a natural death." || That idea abandoned, the 

 two props on which his religion rested — Paley's " Natural The- 

 ology " and Pearson " On the Creed " — gradually gave way. The 

 Paleyan argument disappeared with the abandonment of special 



* i, p. 146. t i, P- 234. X i, p. 2Y8. « i, p. 41. \ i, p. 89. 



