what is false by urging upon it what is true." Of some early opponents
of Darwin it might be said by a candid friend that, in all sincerity of
devotion to truth, they tried to persuade the world of what is true
by urging upon it what is false. If naturalists took their version
of orthodoxy from amateurs in theology, some conservative Christians,
instead of learning what evolution meant to its regular exponents,
took their view of it from celebrated persons, not of the front rank in
theology or in thought, but eager to take account of public movements
and able to arrest public attention.

Cleverness and eloquence on both sides certainly had their share in
producing the very great and general disturbance of men's minds in the
early days of Darwinian teaching. But by far the greater part of that
disturbance was due to the practical novelty and the profound importance
of the teaching itself, and to the fact that the controversy about
evolution quickly became much more public than any controversy of equal
seriousness had been for many generations.

We must not think lightly of that great disturbance because it has, in
some real sense, done its work, and because it is impossible in days
of more coolness and light, to recover a full sense of its very real
difficulties.

Those who would know them better should add to the calm records of
Darwin ("Life and Letters" and "More Letters of Charles Darwin".) and to
the story of Huxley's impassioned championship, all that they can learn
of George Romanes. ("Life and Letters", London, 1896. "Thoughts on
Religion", London, 1895. "Candid Examination of Theism", London, 1878.)
For his life was absorbed in this very struggle and reproduced
its stages. It began in a certain assured simplicity of biblical
interpretation; it went on, through the glories and adventures of a
paladin in Darwin's train, to the darkness and dismay of a man who saw
all his most cherished beliefs rendered, as he thought, incredible.
("Never in the history of man has so terrific a calamity befallen the
race as that which all who look may now (viz. in consequence of the
scientific victory of Darwin) behold advancing as a deluge, black with
destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes,
engulphing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in
mindless destruction."--"A Candid Examination of Theism", page 51.)
He lived to find the freer faith for which process and purpose are
not irre