The last echoes of these utterances reverberated between Scotland and America. In the former country, in 1885, the Rev. Dr. Lee issued a volume declaring that, if the Darwinian view be true, "there is no place for God"; that "by no method of interpretation can the language of Holy Scripture be made wide enough to re-echo the orang-outang theory of man's natural history"; that "Darwinism reverses the revelation of God" and "implies utter blasphemy against the divine and human character of our Incarnate Lord"; and he was pleased to call Darwin and his followers "gospellers of the gutter." In one of the intellectual centres of America the editor of a periodical called The Christian urged frantically that "the battle be set in array, and that men find out who is on the Lord's side and who is on the side of the devil and the monkeys."
To the honour of the Church of England it should be recorded that a considerable number of her truest men opposed such utterances as these, and that one of them—Farrar, Archdeacon of Westminster—made a protest worthy to be held in perpetual remembrance. While confessing his own inability to accept fully the new scientific belief, he said: "We should consider it disgraceful and humiliating to try to shake it by an ad captandum argument, or by a clap-trap platform appeal to the unfathomable ignorance and unlimited arrogance of a prejudiced assembly. We should blush to meet it with an anathema or a sneer."
All opposition had availed nothing; Darwin's work and fame were secure. As men looked back over his beautiful life—simple, honest, tolerant, kindly—and thought upon his great labours in the search for truth, all the attacks faded into nothingness.
There were indeed some dark spots, which as time goes on appear darker. At Trinity College, Cambridge, Whewell, the "omniscient," author of the History of the Inductive Sciences, refused to allow a copy of the Origin of Species to be placed in the library. At multitudes of institutions under theological control—Protestant as well as Catholic—attempts were made to stamp out or to stifle evolutionary teaching. Especially was this true for a time in America, and the case of the American College at Beyrout, where nearly all the younger professors were dismissed for adhering to Darwin's views, is worthy of remembrance. The treatment of Dr. Winchell at the Vanderbilt University in Tennessee showed the same spirit; one of the truest of men, devoted to science but of deeply Christian feeling, he was driven forth for views which centred in the Darwinian theory.
Still more striking was the case of Dr. Woodrow. He had, about 1857, been appointed to a professorship of Natural Science as connected with Revealed Religion, in the Presbyterian Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina. He was a devoted Christian man, and his training had led him to accept the Presbyterian standards of faith. With great gifts for scientific study he visited Europe, made a most conscientious examination of the main questions under discussion, and adopted the chief points in the doctrine of evolution by natural selection. A struggle soon began. A movement hostile to him grew more and more determined, and at last, in spite of the efforts made in his behalf by the directors of the seminary and by a large and broad-minded minority in the representative bodies controlling it, an orthodox storm, raised by the delegates from various Presbyterian bodies, drove him from his post. Fortunately, he was received into a professorship at the University of South Carolina, where he has since taught with more power than ever before.
This testimony to the faith by American provincial Protestantism was very properly echoed from Spanish provincial Catholicism. In the year 1878 a Spanish colonial man of science, Dr. Chil y Marango, published a work on the Canary Islands. But Dr. Chil had the imprudence to sketch, in his introduction, the modern hypothesis of evolution, and to exhibit some proofs, found in the Canary Islands, of the barbarism of primitive man. The ecclesiastical authorities, under the lead of Bishop Urquinaona y Bidot, at once grappled with this new idea. By a solemn act they declared it "falsa, impia, scandalosa"; all persons possessing copies of the work were ordered to surrender them at once to the proper ecclesiastics, and the author was placed under the major excommunication.
But all this opposition may be reckoned among the last expiring convulsions of the old theologic theory. Even from the new Catholic University at Washington has come an utterance in favour of the new doctrine, and in other universities in the Old World and in the New the doctrine of evolution by natural selection has asserted its right to full and honest consideration. More than this, it is clearly evident that the stronger men in the Church have, in these latter days, not only relinquished the struggle against science in this field, but have determined frankly and manfully to make an alliance with it. In two very remarkable lectures given in 1892 at the parish church of Rochdale, Wilson, Archdeacon of Manchester, not only accepted Darwinism as true, but wrought it with great argumentative power into a higher view of Christianity; and what is of great significance, these sermons were published by the same Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge which only a few years before had published the most bitter attacks against the Darwinian theory. So, too, during the year 1893, Prof. Henry Drummond, whose praise is in all the dissenting churches, developed a similar view most brilliantly in a series of lectures delivered before the American Chautauqua schools, and published in one of the most widespread of English orthodox newspapers.
Whatever additional factors may be added to natural selection—and Darwin himself fully admitted that there might be others—the theory of an evolution process in the formation of the universe and of animated nature is established, and the old theory of direct creation is gone forever. In place of it science has given us conceptions far more noble, and opened the way to an argument for design infinitely more beautiful than any ever developed by theology.(24)
(24) For the causes of bitterness shown regarding the Darwinian
hypothesis, see Reusch, Bibel und Natur, vol. ii, pp. 46 et seq. For
hostility in the United States regarding the Darwinian theory, see,
among a multitude of writers, the following: Dr. Charles Hodge, of
Princeton, monograph, What is Darwinism? New York, 1874; also his
Systematic Theology, New York, 1872, vol. ii, part 2, Anthropology; also
The Light by which we see Light, or Nature and the Scriptures, Vedder
Lectures, 1875, Rutgers College, New York, 1875; also Positivism and
Evolutionism, in the American Catholic Quarterly, October 1877, pp. 607,
619; and in the same number, Professor Huxley and Evolution, by Rev. A.
M. Kirsch, pp. 662, 664; The Logic of Evolution, by Prof. Edward F. X.
McSweeney, D. D., July, 1879, p. 561; Das Hexaemeron und die Geologie,
von P. Eirich, Pastor in Albany, N. Y., Lutherischer Concordia-Verlag,
St. Louis, Mo., 1878, pp. 81, 82, 84, 92-94; Evolutionism respecting
Man and the Bible, by John T. Duffield, of Princeton, January, 1878,
Princeton Review, pp. 151, 153, 154, 158, 159, 160, 188; a Lecture on
Evolution, before the Nineteenth Century Club of New York, May 25, 1886,
by ex-President Noah Porter, pp. 4, 26-29. For the laudatory notice of
the Rev. E. F. Burr's demolition of evolution in his book Pater Mundi,
see Monthly Religious Magazine, Boston, May, 1873, p. 492. Concerning
the removal of Dr. James Woodrow, Professor of Natural Science in the
Columbia Theological Seminary, see Evolution or Not, in the New York
Weekly Sun, October 24, 1888. For the dealings of Spanish
ecclesiastics with Dr. Chil and his Darwinian exposition, see the Revue
d'Anthropologie, cited in the Academy for April 6, 1878; see also the
Catholic World, xix, 433, A Discussion with an Infidel, directed against
Dr. Louis Buchner and his Kraft und Stoff; also Mind and Matter, by Rev.
james Tait, of Canada, p. 66 (in the third edition the author bemoans
the "horrible plaudits" that "have accompanied every effort to establish
man's brutal descent"); also The Church Journal, New York, May 28, 1874.
For the effort in favour of a teleological evolution, see Rev. Samuel
Houghton, F. R. S., Principles of Animal Mechanics, London, 1873,
preface and p. 156 and elsewhere. For the details of the persecutions
of Drs. Winchell and Woodrow, and of the Beyrout professors, with
authorities cited, see my chapter on The Fall of Man and Anthropology.
For more liberal views among religious thinkers regarding the Darwinian
theory, and for efforts to mitigate and adapt it to theological
views, see, among the great mass of utterances, the following: Charles
Kingsley's letters to Darwin, November 18, 1859, in Darwin's Life and
Letters, vol. ii, p. 82; Adam Sedgwick to Charles Darwin, December 24,
1859, see ibid., vol. ii, pp. 356-359; the same to Miss Gerard, January
2, 1860, see Sedgewick's Life and Letters, vol. ii, pp. 359, 360; the
same in The Spectator, London, March 24, 1860; The Rambler, March 1860,
cited by Mivart, Genesis of Species, p. 30; The Dublin Review, May,
1860; The Christian Examiner, May, 1860; Charles Kingsley to F. D.
Maurice in 1863, in Kingsley's Life, vol. ii, p. 171; Adam Sedgwick
to Livingstone (the explorer), March 16, 1865, in Life and Letters of
Sedgwick, vol. ii, pp. 410-412; the Duke of Argyll, The Reign of Law,
New York, pp. 16, 18, 31, 116, 117, 120, 159; Joseph P. Thompson, D. D.,
LL.D., Man in Genesis and Geology, New York, 1870, pp. 48, 49, 82; Canon
H. P. Liddon, Sermons preached before the University of Oxford,
1871, Sermon III; St. George Mivart, Evolution and its Consequences,
Contemporary Review, Jan. 1872; British and Foreign Evangelical Review,
1872, article on The Theory of Evolution; The Lutheran Quarterly,
Gettysburg, Pa., April, 1872, article by Rev. Cyrus Thomas, Assistant
United States Geological Survey on The Descent of Man, pp. 214, 239,
372-376; The Lutheran Quarterly, July, 1873, article on Some Assumptions
against Christianity, by Rev. C. A. Stork, Baltimore, Md., pp. 325, 326;
also, in the same number, see a review of Dr. Burr's Pater Mundi, pp.
474, 475, and contrast with the review in the Andover Review of that
period; an article in the Religious Magazine and Monthly Review, Boston,
on Religion and Evolution, by Rev. S. R. Calthrop, September, 1873,
p. 200; The Popular Science Monthly, January, 1874, article Genesis,
Geology, and Evolution; article by Asa Gray, Nature, London, June 4,
1874; Materialism, by Rev. W. Streissguth, Lutheran Quarterly, July,
1875, originally written in German, and translated by J. G. Morris,
D. D., pp. 406, 408; Darwinismus und Christenthum, von R. Steck, Ref.
Pfarrer in Dresden, Berlin, 1875, pp. 5,6, and 26, reprinted from
the Protestantische Kirchenzeitung, and issued as a tract by the
Protestantenverein; Rev. W. E. Adams, article in the Lutheran Quarterly,
April, 1879, on Evolution: Shall it be Atheistic? John Wood, Bible
Anticipations of Modern Science, 1880, pp. 18, 19, 22; Lutheran
Quarterly, January, 1881, Some Postulates of the New Ethics, by Rev.
C. A. Stork, D. D.; Lutheran Quarterly, January, 1882, The Religion of
Evolution as against the Religion of Jesus, by Prof. W. H. Wynn, Iowa
State Agricultural College—this article was republished as a pamphlet;
Canon Liddon, prefatory note to sermon on The Recovery of St. Thomas,
pp. 4, 11, 12, 13, and 26, preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, April 23,
1882; Lutheran Quarterly, January 1882, Evolution and the Scripture, by
Rev. John A. Earnest, pp. 101, 105; Glimpses in the Twilight, by Rev.
F. G. Lee, D. D., Edinburgh, 1885, especially pp. 18 and 19; the Hibbert
Lectures for 1883, by Rev. Charles Beard, pp. 392, 393, et seq.; F.
W. Farrar, D. D., Canon of Westminster, The History of Interpretation,
being the Bampton Lectures for 1885, pp. 426, 427; Bishop Temple,
Bampton Lectures, pp. 184-186; article Evolution in the Dictionary
of Religion, edited by Rev. William Benham, 1887; Prof. Huxley, An
Episcopal Trilogy, Nineteenth Century, November, 1887—this article
discusses three sermons delivered by the bishops of Carlisle, Bedford,
and Manchester, in Manchester Cathedral, during the meeting of the
British Association, September, 1887—these sermons were afterward
published in pamphlet form under the title The Advance of Science; John
Fiske, Darwinism, and Other Essays, Boston, 1888; Harriet Mackenzie,
Evolution illuminating the Bible, London, 1891, dedicated to Prof.
Huxley; H. E. Rye, Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, The Early
Narratives of Genesis, London, 1892, preface, pp. vii-ix, pp. 7, 9, 11;
Rev. G. M. Searle, of the Catholic University, Washington, article in
the Catholic World, November, 1892, pp. 223, 227, 229, 231; for the
statement from Keble College, see Rev. Mr. Illingworth, in Lux Mundi.
For Bishop Temple, see citation in Laing. For a complete and admirable
acceptance of the evolutionary theory as lifting Christian doctrine and
practice to a higher plane, with suggestions for a new theology, see two
Sermons by Archdeacon Wilson, of Manchester, S. P. C. K.. London,
and Young & Co., New York, 1893; and for a characteristically lucid
statement of the most recent development of evolution doctrines, and the
relations of Spencer, Weismann, Galton, and others to them, see Lester
F. Ward's Address as President of the Biological Society, Washington,
1891; also, recent articles in the leading English reviews. For a
brilliant glorification of evolution by natural selection as a doctrine
necessary to then highest and truest view of Christianity, see Prof.
Drummond's Chautauqua Lectures, published in the British Weekly, London,
from April 20 to May 11, 1893.