42 THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 
raphers in those days and the tenseness of the moment, 
which made everyone forget to take down what was 
said, make it impossible to tell exactly what happened. 
It seems that Bishop Wilberforce, appealing to the 
prejudices of his audience, said, in language that now 
seems ludicrous but then was terribly bitter: “How- 
ever, any of us might be willing to consider ourselves 
descended from an ape upon his father’s side, no one 
would so demean his mother’s memory as to imagine 
that she could possibly have shared in this descent.” 
Huxley, who had waited patiently for the close of the 
bishop’s address, saw immediately the fatal mistake. 
Turning to his companion beside him, he said, “The 
Lord has delivered the Philistine into my hands,” and, 
rising, he hurled back at the bishop the indignant 
reply, “I should far rather owe my origin to an ape 
than I would owe it to a man who would use great 
gifts to obscure the truth.” The bishop had made the 
mistake, and the struggle was on. Year by year it 
raged. One by one the scientists, first of England, 
and then of Germany, took their stand by Darwin. 
Huxley in England and Haeckel in Germany were the 
foremost advocates of the Darwinian idea. Long 
and fiercely the battle raged; slowly and gradually 
men began to see that, instead of undermining relig- 
ion, the idea of evolution uplifted creation and made it 
not a strange happening in the distant past, but a 
