DAVID WORTH DENNIS— AN APPRECIATION. 73 



"A fire-mist and a planet 

 A crystal and a cell 

 A jelly-fish and a saurian 

 And a cave where the cavemen dwell, 

 Then a sense of law and beauty 

 And a face turned from the clod, 

 Some call it Evolution 

 And others call it God." 



Fearlessly, yet reverently, he championed the cause of the new knowl- 

 edge, for he felt deeply, as did the late Professor Drummond, that the idea 

 of evolution had come into the world just in time to save it from despair. 

 It mattered not to him that some of the teachings of this new knowledge 

 seemed to run counter to certain old and time-honored notions held else- 

 where. He felt in his inmost being that all truth is one and comes from God, 

 and then and always he followed fearlessly and without misgiving wherever 

 truth seemed to lead. 



Now some of the finest spirits of our time have been chilled and depressed 

 by the great discoveries of modern science, for it has seemed to them to ac- 

 centuate that sense of disproportion between man and the mere vastness 

 of the material universe. To them man has seemed to have been left- or- 

 phaned and alone in a world without purpose or design. Professor Dennis 

 accepted the conclusions of modern science without reservation, yet with a 

 deep and abiding faith that there is a kind heart beating through the scheme 

 of things. He could exclaim with Tennyson "All's love, yet all's law." 

 And again with Carlyle "the universe is not dead and demoniacal, a charnel 

 house full of spectres, but God-like and my father's." 



Those of us who came upon the scene at a somewhat later time have little 

 conception of how hotly the battle raged in those days, now long gone by, 

 nor can we adequately conceive of what courage it required to champion 

 the cause of evolution, especially in those ultra-conservative communities 

 that held steadfsatly to the old traditional thought. 



I said a moment ago that Dr. Dennis was not a specialist in any particu- 

 lar liranch of science but that he was interested in the entire kingdom of 

 nature. He "saw life steadily and saw it whole." So in his early years he 

 caught a vision of another kingdom, the one which the simple Galilean peas- 

 ant came to establish in the lives and hearts of men. Those of us who knew 

 him best can testify that few men have embodied more fully in their lives 

 the spirit of the gentle Nazarene. It has never been my privilege to know 

 any one who in his thinking had so completely gotten rid of that old and 

 often times arbitrary distinction between things sacred and things secular. 

 To him the whole of life and its activities was bathed with a sacred and trans- 

 figuring significance. 



I must say just a word about his spirit of magnanimity, his generosity, 



