172 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION. 



of people's opinions on such high matters goes, this 

 is true; but it is a shallow saying when applied to 

 men whose words carry weight, or whose discoveries 

 cause us to ask what is their bearing on the larger 

 questions of human relations and destinies to which 

 past ages have given answers that no longer satisfy 

 us, or that are not compatible with the facts dis- 

 covered. Whatever silence Darwin maintained in 

 his books as to his religious opinions, intelligent 

 readers would see that unaggressive as was the mode 

 of presentments of his theory, it undermined current 

 beliefs in special providence, with its special creations 

 and contrivances, and therefore in the intermittent 

 interference of a deity; thus excluding that super- 

 natural action of which miracles are the decaying 

 stock evidence. 



Nor could they fail to ask whether the theory of 

 natural selection by " descent with modification " was 

 to apply to the human species. And when Darwin, 

 already anticipated in this application by his more 

 daring disciples, Professors Huxley and Haeckel, 

 published his Descent of Man, with its outspoken 

 chapter on the origin of conscience and the develop- 

 ment of belief in spiritual beings, a belief subject to 

 periodical revision as knowledge increased, it was 

 obvious that the bottom was knocked out of all 

 traditional dogmas of man's fall and redemption, of 

 human sin and divine forgiveness. Therefore, what 

 Darwin himself believed was a matter of moment. 

 His answers to inquiries which were made public 



