324 Charles Darwin : a Farewell Offering. [June, 
Darwin of later years a Christian.” A certain doctrinaire 
weekly organ, noted for its anti-viviseCtionist leanings, re- 
cords that Darwin’s system has “no room for special provi- 
dences or the doctrines consequent on this dogma.” The 
writer, perhaps, forgets that the very same charge has been 
urged against Newton, and, due allowance being made for 
the difference of the subjedt, with equal show of reason. 
Fortunately it is not my duty, nor that of the “Journal of 
Science,” to adjudicate between the saints and the sinners. 
That such a contest should have been raised over Darwin’s 
grave is the best evidence of his greatness. But I cannot 
forget how very recently the Churches which now claim him 
were denouncing him, not merely as a heretic and an atheist, 
but as one who intentionally and consciously sought to sap 
the religious convidtions of mankind. It is scarcely seven 
years since the Rev. F. O. Morris, a clergyman of the same 
Church as Canons Farrar and Liddon, in a pamphlet entitled 
“ All the Articles of the Darwin Faith,” put in the mouth of 
him whom we have just lost these very words : — “ I have 
done all I could to make others as wretched as I am myself ; 
I do my little best or worst to shake their faith, &c.” Nor 
has the spirit which breathes in the lines just quoted entirely 
subsided. Says the “ Univers ” — “ When hypotheses tend to 
nothing less than the destrudtion of faith, the shutting out 
God from the human heart and the diffusion of the filthy 
leprosy of Materialism, the savant who invents and propa- 
gates them is either a criminal or a fool. Voila ce que nous 
avons a dire du Darwin des singes .” I certainly will not as- 
cribe to the staff of the “ Univers ” a descent from apes; I 
should rather trace their pedigree direft to the Harpies of 
classic saga. Assuredly they have most wonderfully retained 
the ancestral habit of defiling with their fcedissima proluvies 
everything worthy of honour. Leaving, however, the 
“ Univers” as a matter scarcely fit to be even spoken of 
without apology, and ignoring “ La Patrie,” — less foul, 
though no less deluded, — let us look at home. Have we as 
a nation treated our great countryman, in life and in death, 
in a manner upon which we can look back with satisfaction ? 
Fortunately for himself, and still more fortunately for the 
world, he was a man of independent means,* and hence invul- 
nerable by the favourite weapon of modern persecution. 
But had he been like his father, a physician, would not his 
patients have been duly warned not to place themselves in 
* Is it not worth noting that, like Darwin, Lyell, Buffon, Lamarck, Hum- 
boldt were gentlemen ? Is, perhaps, hereditary culture necessary for the great 
generaliser ? 
