280 GEOEGE JOHN EOMANES 1892 



intimately to note the exceeding severity, the almost 

 harsh manner in which he treated the theological 

 questions involved in the doctrines called, for conve- 

 nience sake, ' Darwinism.' As more and more he 

 found himself yielding on the side of emotion, of 

 moral convictions, inducement, of spiritual need to 

 the relinquished faith, so much the more did he re- 

 solve to be utterly true, to face every difficulty, to 

 push no objection aside, to leave nothing unsaid — to 

 be, in fact, absolutely and entirely honest. As a friend 

 after his death, speaking of t*his very book, said, ' It 

 was his righteousness which made him seem so hard.' 

 Yet there is a ring of hope of something which 

 will one day turn to faith in the words which end the 

 book : 



' Upon the whole, then, it seems to me that such 

 evidence as we have is against rather than in favour 

 of the inference, that if design be operative in 

 animate nature it has reference to animal enjoyment 

 or well-being, as distinguished from animal improve- 

 ment or evolution. And if this result should be 

 found distasteful to the religious mind — if it be felt 

 that there is no desire to save the evidences of design 

 unless they serve at the same time to testify to the 

 nature of that design as beneficent — I must once 

 more observe that the difficulty thus presented to 

 theism is not a difficulty of modern creation. On 

 the contrary, it has always constituted the funda- 

 mental difficulty with which natural theologians 

 have had to contend. The external world appears, 

 in this respect, to be at variance with our moral 

 sense ; and when the antagonism is brought home to 

 the religious mind, it must ever be with a shock of 



