irected by the Divine
Intelligence. One statement he made struck me forcibly in this
connection, viz.: that he believed that the evolution of the horse
reached its culmination synchronously with the evolution of man, and
that the agreement was a part of the divine plan, while Darwin refuses
to admit a plan in creation. I have heard amongst evolutionists much
bitterness expressed concerning Owen for what they considered his
yielding to the pressure of public opinion, and adopting the theory of
evolution in contradiction to his real convictions; but I saw enough
of him to be certain that he really believed in evolution subject
to the dominance of the Divine Intelligence, nor did any of the
accusations I heard against him persuade me of the least insincerity
in his acceptance of the theory with that qualification,--a position,
I am convinced, held by many, even then, who did not openly support
it, not caring to go counter to the very general advocacy of natural
selection.

The teaching of Owen completed my conversion to the theory of
evolution as a general law, not on grounds of physical science, the
demonstration by which is and must remain forever incomplete, but on
the philosophical ground, which I was more capable of measuring; and
with the acceptance of evolution disappeared, logically and, in the
subsequent years, completely, the influence of the old anthropomorphic
religion, with its terrible dogmas of the inheritance of Adam's
transgression and an angry God with His vicarious punishment of His
only son, with all the puzzles of miraculous intervention and the
perplexities of an infallible revealed word which continually
contradicts itself. The conception of Deity thus liberated from the
fetters of a materialistic faith rose to a dignity I had never before
comprehended, and brought me the new perception of a spiritual
religion and life, which was more consoling and vivifying by far than
the old belief.

It is possible that the impressions of that time have been modified by
my subsequent intercourse with scientific men in England; but they are
that the very wide and rapid acceptance of the theory of evolution by
natural selection was largely due to the relief it offered from the
incubus of the old theological conception of the Deity as a personal
agency, always interfering with the course of events,--an infinite,
omnipotent, and omniscient stage manager,--a conception under which
the Christian world at large lay wh