I 4 3 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



their portion with those who in this life " know not 

 God and obey not the Gospel of His Son." ' >But 

 the most notable attack came from Samuel Wilber- 

 force, then Bishop of Oxford, in the Quarterly Review 

 of July 1 860. * It is,' said Huxley, in his review of 

 Haeckel's Evolution of Man, 'a production which 

 should be bound in good stout calf, or better, asses' 

 skin, by the curious book -collector, together with 

 Brougham's attack on the undulatory theory of light 

 when it was first propounded by Young.' The bishop 

 declared 'the principle of natural selection to be 

 absolutely incompatible with the word of God' and as 

 ' contradicting the revealed relations of creation to its 

 Creator.' If by * revealed relations ' and the c word 

 of God ' the Bible is intended, the evolutionist is in 

 agreement with the bishop. But, at this time of day, 

 it seems scarcely worth while to shake the dust off 

 articles which have gone the way of all purely contro- 

 versial matter, and justification for reference to them 

 lies only in the fact that the contest between the 

 biologists and the theologians is not yet ended 



As evidence of the compromise by which 

 theology strives vainly to justify itself, we may 

 quote vague sentences from Archdeacon Wilson's 

 address at the Church Congress at Shrewsbury in 

 the autumn of 1896: 'It is scarcely too much to 

 say that the Theistic Evolutionist cannot be other- 

 wise than a practical Trinitarian, and cannot find 

 a difficulty in the Incarnation or in the doctrine of 

 the Holy Spirit.' ' Christian doctrine, apart from 

 the statement of historical facts, is the attempt to 

 create out of Christ's teaching, a philosophy of life 

 which shall satisfy these needs (i.e. the needs of 



