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? and to the story of Huxley's impassioned 
championship, all that they can learn of George Romanes®. 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*. 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. Candia 
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.”—A Candid Examination of Theism, p. 51. 
