[[8]] A Candid Examination of Theism (1876), pp. 171, f.
[[9]] Nineteenth Century, February, 1888.
CHAPTER IV
THE COUNTER-ARGUMENTS
It must not be imagined that all the arguments were on one side. Far from it. The defenders of the old faith were many, and not the least able of them were drawn from the ranks of the men of science. The list of scientific leaders who avowedly ranged themselves on the Christian side, if it were made out, would be a long one. It would include distinguished names such as those of Faraday, Joule, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Kelvin, Stokes, Tait, Adams, Clerk Maxwell, Salmon, Cayley, and Pasteur. And others would have to be added who, after contending for a while as materialists or agnostics, ultimately changed their attitude and joined the supporters of Theism. Haeckel frankly admitted that there were such defaulters from his cause in Germany, giving the names of "two of the most famous of living scientists, R. Virchow and E. Du Bois Raymond," amongst others. On the other hand he recommended his readers to study "the profound work of Romanes," without, it would seem, being aware of the transformation that took place in that thinker's opinions towards the end of his life.
We have now to indicate the nature of the replies that were made to the difficulties of which we spoke in our last chapter. Let us follow the order in which they were presented.
About the necessity for a First Cause not much had to be said. Even if the whole course of organic development could be proved to have been continuous without a break from the first movements of matter, through all the changes of physical life, up to the highest exhibition of human powers—and no one ventured to say that this had been proved—there would still be the necessity for an initial impulse to set the process in action. Spencer, as we have seen, declared that there must have been a First Cause, and Tyndall agreed that "the hypothesis" of Evolution "does nothing more than transport the conception of life's origin to an indefinitely distant past."[[1]]
Darwin himself never hesitated on this point. "The theory of evolution," he insisted, "is quite compatible with the belief in God."[[2]] The words which he expressly added to the conclusion of the Origin of Species are well known. After describing once again the production of the innumerable forms of being as the result of natural selection, he said: "There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one."