iv MODERN E VOL UTION 1 47 



Dr. Whewell remarked that every great discovery in 

 science has had to pass through three stages.. First 

 people said, ' It is absurd ' ; then they said, ' It is 

 contrary to the Bible ' ; finally, they said, ' We always 

 knew that it was so.' Thus it has been with Evolution. 

 It is calmly discussed ; even claimed as a ' defender 

 of the faith,' at Church Congresses nowadays. It was 

 not so in the sixties. Here and there a single voice 

 was raised in qualified sympathy Charles Kingsley 

 and Canon Tristram showed more than this but both 

 in the Old and the New World the 'drum ecclesiastic' 

 was beaten. Cardinal Manning declared Darwinism 

 to be a ' brutal philosophy, to wit, there is no God 

 and the ape is our Adam.' Protestant and Catholic 

 agreed in condemning it as * an attempt to dethrone 

 God ' ; as ' a huge imposture,' as * tending to produce 

 disbelief of the Bible/ and ' to do away with all idea 

 of God,' as ' turning the Creator out of doors.' Such 

 are fair samples to be culled from the anthology of 

 invective which was the staple content of nearly 

 every ' criticism.' Occasionally some parody of 

 reasoning appears when the ' argument ' is advanced 

 that there is ' a simpler explanation of the presence 

 of these strange forms among the works of God in 

 the fall of Adam,' but even this pseudo-concession to 

 logic is rare ; and one divine had no hesitation in 

 predicting the fate of Darwin and his followers in 

 the world to come. ' If/ said a Dr. Duffield in the 

 Princeton -Review, 'the development theory of the 

 origin of man shall, in a little while, take the place 

 as doubtless it will with other exploded scientific 

 speculations, then they who accept it with its proper 

 logical consequences will, in the life to come, have 



