Creation and Evolution 485 
inconsistent with Creation; natural selection with Providence and 
Divine design. 
Discussion was maintained about these points for many years and 
with much dark heat. It ranged over many particular topics and 
engaged minds different in tone, in quality, and in accomplishment. 
There was at most times a degree of misconception. Some naturalists 
attributed to theologians in general a poverty of thought which 
belonged really to men of a particular temper or training. The 
“timid theism” discerned in Darwin by so cautious a theologian as 
Liddont was supposed by many biologists to be the necessary 
foundation of an honest Christianity. It was really more character- 
istic of devout naturalists like Philip Henry Gosse, than of religious 
believers as such?. The study of theologians more considerable and 
even more typically conservative than Liddon does not confirm the 
description of religious intolerance given in good faith, but in serious 
ignorance, by a disputant so acute, so observant and so candid as 
Huxley. Something hid from each other’s knowledge the devoted 
pilgrims in two great ways of thought. The truth may be, that 
naturalists took their view of what creation was from Christian 
men of science who naturally looked in their own special studies for 
the supports and illustrations of their religious belief. Of almost 
every laborious student it may be said “Hic ab arte sua non recessit.” 
And both the believing and the denying naturalists, confining habitual 
attention to a part of experience, are apt to affirm and deny with 
trenchant vigour and something of a narrow clearness “Qui re- 
spicrunt ad pauca, de facili pronunciant’.” 
Newman says of some secular teachers that “they persuade the 
world of what is false by urging upon it what is true.” Of some 
early opponents of Darwin it might be said by a candid friend that, 
in all sincerity of devotion to truth, they tried to persuade the world 
of what is true by urging upon it what is false. If naturalists took 
their version of orthodoxy from amateurs in theology, some con- 
servative Christians, instead of learning what evolution meant to 
its regular exponents, took their view of it from celebrated persons, 
not of the front rank in theology or in thought, but eager to take 
account of public movements and able to arrest public attention. 
1H, P. Liddon, The Recovery of S. Thomas; a sermon preached in St Paul’s, London, 
on April 23rd, 1882 (the Sunday after Darwin’s death). 
2 Dr Pusey (Unscience not Science adverse to Faith, 1878) writes: “The questions as 
to ‘species,’ of what variations the animal world is capable, whether the species be more 
or fewer, whether accidental variations may become hereditary...... and the like, naturally 
fall under the province of science. In all these questions Mr Darwin’s careful observa- 
tions gained for him a deserved approbation and confidence.” 
3 Aristotle, in Bacon, quoted by Newman in his Idea of a University, p. 78. London, 
1873. 
