78 DAKWINIANISM. 



good young man, seeing that as Mr. Darwin adds, 

 referring to it (the interest), " for I was as ignorant as a 

 pig about his subjects of history, politics, and moral 

 philosophy." " Praise from an eminent person " this 

 is the moral of Mr. Darwin himself here " is, I think, 

 good for a young man, as it helps to keep him in the 

 right course." 



Charles Darwin, after Edinburgh, did not proceed to 

 Cambridge at the usual time in October, but after the 

 Christmas vacation, early in 1828. He found that, in 

 the two intervening years after leaving school, he " had 

 actually forgotten almost everything which he had learnt, 

 even to some few of the Greek letters ; " hence the 

 necessity of a certain delay while he worked under a 

 private tutor at Shrewsbury. Why he went now to 

 Cambridge was that it had been decided that he should 

 become a clergyman, and that it was necessary, accord- 

 ingly, that he should go to one of the English universities 

 and take a degree. 



As regards religion, we can pretty well understand 

 how we are to look upon it in his case so far. His 

 father, like his grandfather, was, as we have seen, lax ; 

 his mother and her relations were Unitarians ; while he 

 himself, though beginning his education under a Unitarian 

 minister, belonged with his brother, " nominally," to the 

 Church of England. In such circumstances, a profession 

 must have appeared on the whole simply a profession ; 

 and there could not, naturally, have been much difficulty 

 or demur in the mind of the young man as regards the 

 Church in the first instance. " As he did not then 

 doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the 

 Bible, he soon persuaded himself, after reading a few- 

 books on divinity, that our Creed must be fully accepted." 

 This, like that of many others, was but a lukewarm 

 beginning, and it never grew warmer. The temperature 



