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Darwin, she is represented as contemplating not their 

 happiness, but merely their slow evolution through 

 indefinite time, in the course of which their material 

 well-being is ever being offered up and sacrificed upon 

 the shrine of far remote developmental issues, while 

 present misery must be the lot of everything that lives. 

 I desire, as far as lies in my power, to revive in 

 the minds of young men, who are prone to accept 

 as authoritative the current beliefs that prevail in 

 scientific coteries, a reverence for the Divine in Nature, 

 and a belief in the moral and spiritual forces of the 

 Universe ; to counteract, in short, that gross and 

 degrading materialism which Darwin has gone far to 

 make the recognised stamp of present-day scientific 

 thought. I am not turned aside from my task by 

 being constrained to acknowledge that there is a 

 general consensus of opinion that the doctrine of 

 Darwin is founded on the solid rock, that it has stood 

 the test of time, and come triumphantly out of the 

 fiercest fires of controversy ; that it has won the 

 enthusiastic assent of the scientist as of the man in 

 the street ; that the whole literature of two generations 

 has pronounced it inviolable and irrefutable. 



I am sufficiently acquainted with the scientific 

 speculations of past ages, and with the various Nature- 

 creeds that have had their day, and obtained during 

 their currency the universal assent of thinking men as 

 well as of the multitude from the time of Anaxagoras 

 up to the present hour, to be well assured that the 

 concurrence of mankind, embracing all its intelligence, 



