iv MODERN EVOLUTION 203 



shrunk from controversy, but he has not forsaken 

 the study for the arena, and hence his influence, 

 great and abiding as it is, has been less direct and 

 personal than that of his comrade, ' ever a fighter, 1 

 who, in Browning's words, ' marched breast forward.' 

 Man's Place in Nature was the first of a series of de- 

 liverances upon the most serious questions that can 

 occupy the mind ; and its successors, the brilliant 

 monograph on Hume, published in 1879, and the 

 Romanes Lecture on Evolution and Ethics, delivered 

 at Oxford, i8th May 1893, are but expansions of 

 the thesis laid down in that wonderful little volume ; 

 wonderful in the prevision which fills it, and in the 

 justification which it has received from all subse- 

 quent research, notably in psychology. 



If the propositions therein maintained are un- 

 shaken, then there is no possible reconciliation 

 between Evolution and Theology, and all the smooth 

 sayings in attempted harmonies between the two, of 

 which Professor Drummond's Ascent of Man is a 

 type, and in speeches at Church Congresses of which 

 that delivered by Archdeacon Wilson (see p. 148) is 

 a type, do but hypnotise the ' light half-believers of 

 our casual creeds.' To some there are ' signs of the 

 times ' which point to approaching acquiescence in 

 the sentiment of Ovid, paralleled by a famous passage 

 in Gibbon, that 'the existence of the gods is a 

 matter of public policy, and we must believe it 

 accordingly.' It looks like the prelude to sur- 

 render of what is the cardinal dogma of Christianity 

 when we read in the Archdeacon's address that * the 

 theory of Evolution is indeed fatal to certain quasi- 

 mythological doctrines of the Atonement which once 



