up
chiefly on the side of those who call themselves religionists, who
mostly seem to be unable to bring forward any new arguments, and no less
to fail to appreciate the attitude and the purpose of those whom they
have made their antagonists. Science, as we believe, did not seek this
controversy, but was forced into it by the attacks of the champions of
religion, and is now necessarily kept somewhat on the defence. It would
seem that nearly all that can be said, and all that need be said, has
already been brought forward. But each new disputant that enters upon
the defence of theological dogma seems to be convinced that he is the
man of men who is to protect religion against what he believes to be the
danger in which it is placed by the observation of nature and the
speculation upon discovered facts which now occupies so many physicists,
including some of first-rate ability.

We may as well say, if we have not already said in our previous remarks
upon the books upon this question which have been reviewed in the pages
of "The Galaxy," that we do not regard the theory of evolution as
established. Facts of great interest bearing upon it have been
discovered, and deductions from those facts have been made and set
forth with great ingenuity and plausibility, so that it demands serious
attention _from the scientific point of view_. But this seems to us all
that has been done. Our feelings and our convictions, not to say our
creed, are all against it. It is a degrading and a hopeless view of the
universe, and particularly of man. Him it places in the attitude of a
mere physical item in the cosmos--one link, although the last and a
golden one, in a chain of events the beginning and the future of which
are alike unknown. All our instincts revolt against it. We don't
believe it; and we candidly confess that we are in the position,
abhorrent and ridiculous to the scientific mind, of not wishing to
believe it. We believe, and we desire to believe, that man was made,
however and when, as man; and that however inferior he may have been in
his first condition to what he is now, he was never anything less than
human.

Feeling thus and believing thus, we nevertheless cannot see that those
who are resisting science on the ground that its assumed discoveries are
at war with the assumed teachings of revealed religion are doing wisely,
or that they, even the best of them, have written one word which in the
least impairs the value or the si