486 Darwinism and Religious Thought 



Cleverness and eloquence on both sides certainly had their share 

 in producing the very great and general disturbance of men's minds 

 in the early days of Darwinian teaching. But by far the greater 

 part of that disturbance was due to the practical novelty and the 

 profound importance of the teaching itself, and to the fact that the 

 controversy about evolution quickly became much more public than 

 any controversy of equal seriousness had been for many generations. 



We must not think lightly of that great disturbance because it 

 has, in some real sense, done its work, and because it is impossible 

 in days of more coolness and light, to recover a full sense of its very 

 real difficulties. 



Those who would know them better should add to the calm 

 records of Darwin 1 and to the story of Huxley's impassioned 

 championship, all that they can learn of George Romanes 2 . For his 

 life was absorbed in this very struggle and reproduced its stages. 

 It began in a certain assured simplicity of biblical interpretation; 

 it went on, through the glories and adventures of a paladin in 

 Darwin's train, to the darkness and dismay of a man who saw all 

 his most cherished beliefs rendered, as he thought, incredible 3 . He 

 lived to find the freer faith for which process and purpose are not 

 irreconcilable, but necessary to one another. His development, 

 scientific, intellectual and moral, was itself of high significance ; and 

 its record is of unique value to our own generation, so near the age 

 of that doubt and yet so far from it ; certainly still much in need of 

 the caution and courage by which past endurance prepares men for 

 new emergencies. We have little enough reason to be sure that in 

 the discussions awaiting us we shall do as well as our predecessors in 

 theirs. Remembering their endurance of mental pain, their ardour 

 in mental labour, the heroic temper and the high sincerity of con- 

 troversialists on either side, we may well speak of our fathers in such 

 words of modesty and self-judgment as Drayton used when he sang 

 the victors of Agincourt. The progress of biblical study, in the 

 departments of Introduction and Exegesis, resulting in the recovery 

 of a point of view anciently tolerated if not prevalent, has altered 

 some of the conditions of that discussion. In the years near 1858, 

 the witness of Scripture was adduced both by Christian advocates and 

 their critics as if unmistakeably irreconcilable with Evolution. 



1 Life and Letters and More Letters of Charles Darwin. 



2 Life and Letters, London, 1896. Thoughts on Religion, London, 1895. Candid 

 Examination of Theism, London, 1878. 



3 "Never in the history of man has so terrific a calamity befallen the race as that 

 which all who look may now (viz. in consequence of the scientific victory of Darwin) 

 behold advancing as a deluge, black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our 

 most cherished hopes, engulphing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in 

 mindless destruction."—^ Candid Examination of Theism, p. 51. 



