82 GEOEGE JOHN EOMANES 1878 



between faith and scepticism which grew more and 

 more strenuous, more painful, as the years went on, 

 which never really ceased until within a few weeks 

 of his death, and which was destined to end in a 

 chastened, a purified, and a victorious faith. His 

 was a religious nature, keenly alive to religious 

 emotion, profoundly influenced by Christian ideals, 

 by Christian modes of thought. As time went on he 

 felt, like all philosophically minded men, the impossi- 

 bility of a purely materialistic position, and as he 

 pondered on the final, ultimate mysteries, on * ' God, 

 Immortality, Duty,' he arrived very slowly, very 

 painfully, but very surely, at the Christian position. 



But these years were, to him and to many, years 

 of peculiar and of extraordinary difficulty. Roughly 

 speaking, the time between 1860 and 1880 was a time 

 of great perplexity to those who wished to adhere to 

 the faith of Christendom. 



It is impossible to exaggerate the influence which 

 Mr. Darwin's great work has had on every depart- 

 ment of science, of literature, and also of art. 

 Thirty-six years have passed away since the publica- 

 tion of the ' Origin of Species,' and we have lived to 

 see that again tempora matantur, nos et mutamur in 

 Mis. Now we see that a man can fully accept the 

 doctrine of evolution, and yet can also believe in a 

 personal God and in the doctrines which logically 

 follow on such a belief. But it was not so at first. 

 To many on both sides the new teaching seemed to 

 threaten destruction to Theism, at least to Theism as 

 understood either by Newman or by Martineau. 



Again, in philosophy Herbert Spencer seemed to 

 "many to have constructed a lasting system of philo- 



1 Cf. F. Myers's 'Essay on George Eliot,' Modern Essays, p. 269. 



