232 LUTHER BURBANK 



the matter of church contributions. But this 

 severance of church and state, so to speak, did 

 not so much represent a reaction against the doc- 

 trines of a particular church, as a general reaction 

 against the obligatory recognition of any church 

 whatever. 



For there had come about in the course of one 

 or two decades a most iconoclastic change in the 

 attitude of mind of the leaders of thought 

 throughout Christendom toward the tenets that 

 had hitherto been thought essential to man's 

 spiritual welfare. 



Following the publication of Darwin's "Origin 

 of Species" in 1859, the intellectual world was in 

 a ferment, and nowhere was the influence of the 

 new ideas more quickly felt or tumultuously 

 argued than in New England. 



I was ten years old when Darwin's iconoclastic 

 document was promulgated, and hence I grew 

 into adolescence in the very period when it was 

 most ardently bruited. The idea that animals 

 and plants have not originated through special 

 creation but have evolved one form from another 

 throughout long ages; and the logical culmina- 

 tion of that idea in the inclusion of man himself in 

 the evolutionary chain these are commonplaces 

 to-day. They are familiar doctrines that might 

 find expression from every orthodox pulpit. 



