152 HOMO V. DARWIN. 



self-restraint. There would then be a case of what Mr. 

 Darwin might regard as "reversion" indeed ; civilized men 

 would become civilized savages, and the world would go 

 back into the darkness of the deepest moral night. 



I can have no wish to charge Mr. Darwin with^atheism, 

 but, certainly, his work now before us, while it speaks of 

 " a Creator and Euler of the universe," and of the question 

 as to his existence having been "answered in the affirmative 

 by the highest intellects that have over lived," contains no 

 clear and definite acknowledgment of belief in Him as 

 cherished by Mr. Darwin himself. Practically, Darwinism 

 — as it has been called — in this latest exposition of it, is 

 atheism, and atheism of the most dreary and hopeless kind. 

 If it does not deny God, it ignores God. Its tendency is to 

 remove the Divine Being entirely from the view of man, 

 and to lead to disbelief in his having any connection what- 

 ever with, or interest in, human affairs. The world is given 

 up by Him to the hard, conscienceless, unsympathetic power 

 and rule of Natural Selection. There is no beneficent pro- 

 vidence.* For anything that God now does in the province 

 of Nature and of man, there might as well be written over 

 it, "No God is here." If man come to have " the idea of 

 ia universal and beneficent Creator of the universe," it is 

 not " until he has been elevated by long-continued culture." 

 If " the feeling of religious devotion" inspire man, it is 

 but the result of the development in him of faculties 

 which the lower animals possess as well as himself; — for, 

 " in the deep love of a dog for his master " "we see 



In reply to Professor Asa Gray, Mr. Darwin maintains that, although, 

 we might wish to find proof that a beneficent providence had guided 

 the evolution of animal forms, we have no evidence that a beneficent 

 providence has done so even in the case of man himself. See the 

 closing sentences of Mr. Darwin's work on " The Variation of Animals 

 and Plants under Domestication." 



