LUTHER BURBANK 



against the obligatory recognition of any church 

 whatever. 



For there had come about in the course of one 

 or two decades a most iconoclastic change in the 

 attitude of mind of the leaders of thought through- 

 out Christendom towards the tenets that had 

 hitherto been thought essential to man's spiritual 

 welfare. 



Following the publication of Darwin's Origin 

 of Species in 1859, the intellectual world was in a 

 ferment, and nowhere was the influence of the 

 new ideas more quickly felt or tumultuously 

 argued than in New England. 



I was ten years old when Darwin's iconoclastic 

 document was promulgated, and hence I grew 

 into adolescence in the very period when it was 

 most ardently bruited. The idea that animals and 

 plants have not originated through special creation 

 but have evolved one form frona another through- 

 out long ages; and the logical culmination of that 

 idea in the inclusion of man himself in the evolu- 

 tionary chain — these are commonplaces to-day. 

 They are familiar doctrines that might find ex- 

 pression from every orthodox pulpit. 



But in those stormy days of the sixties, such 

 ideas were not merely heretical — they seemed 

 absolutely revolutionary. 



If this new view were accepted, in the minds 



[32] 



