As for Darwin himself, he stood the storm of misunderstanding and abuse without scorn or resentment.
"Truth must fight its way," he said; "and this gauntlet of criticism is all for the best. What is true in my book will survive, and that which is error will be blown away as chaff." He was neither exalted by praise nor cast down by censure. For Huxley, Lyell, Hooker, Spencer, Wallace and Asa Gray he had a great and profound love—what they said affected him deeply, and their steadfast kindness at times touched him to tears. For the great, seething, outside world that had not thought along abstruse scientific lines, and could not, he cared little.
"How can we expect them to see as we do," he wrote to Gray; "it has taken me thirty years of toil and research to come to these conclusions. To have the unthinking masses accept all that I say would be calamity: this opposition is a winnowing process, and all a part of the Law of Evolution that works for good."
or forty years Darwin lived in the same house at Down, in the same quiet, simple way. Here he lived and worked, and the world gradually came to him, figuratively and literally. Gradually it dawned upon the theologians that a God who could set in motion natural laws that worked with beneficent and absolute regularity was just as great as if He had made everything at once and then stopped.
The miracle of evolution is just as sublime as the miracle of Adam's deep sleep and the making of a woman out of a man's rib. The faith of the scientist who sees order, regularity and unfailing law is quite as great as that of a preacher who believes everything he reads in a book. The scientist is a man with faith, plus.
When Darwin died, in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-two, Darwinism and infidelity were words no longer synonymous.
The discrepancies and inconsistencies of the theories of Darwin were seen by him as by his critics, and he was ever willing to admit the doubt. None of his disciples was as ready to modify his opinions as he. "We must beware of making science dogmatic," he once said to Haeckel.
And at another time he said, "I would feel I had gone too far were it not for Wallace, who came to the same conclusions, quite independently of me." Darwin's mind was simple and childlike. He was a student, always learning, and no one was too mean or too poor for him to learn from. The patience, persistency and untiring industry of the man, combined with the daring imagination that saw the thing clearly long before he could prove it, and the gentle forbearance in the presence of unkindness and misunderstanding, won the love of a nation.
He wished to be buried in the churchyard at Down, but at his death, by universal acclaim, the gates of Westminster swung wide to receive the dust of the man whom bishops, clergy and laymen alike had reviled. Darwin had won, not alone because he was right, but because his was a truly great and loving soul—a soul without the least resentment.