rly
Designer, and Shelley's Almighty Fiend, and all the rest of the
pseudo-religious rubbish that had blocked every upward and onward path
since the hopes of men had turned to Science as their true Savior. It
seemed such a convenient grave that nobody at first noticed that it was
nothing less than the bottomless pit, now become a very real terror. For
though Darwin left a path round it for his soul, his followers presently
dug it right across the whole width of the way. Yet for the moment,
there was nothing but wild rejoicing: a sort of scientific mafficking.
We had been so oppressed by the notion that everything that happened in
the world was the arbitrary personal act of an arbitrary personal god
of dangerously jealous and cruel personal character, so that even the
relief of the pains of childbed and the operating table by chloroform
was objected to as an interference with his arrangements which he would
probably resent, that we just jumped at Darwin. When Napoleon was asked
what would happen when he died, he said that Europe would express its
intense relief with a great 'Ouf!': Well, when Darwin killed the god who
objected to chloroform, everybody who had ever thought about it said
'Ouf!' Paley was buried fathoms deep with his watch, now fully accounted
for without any divine artificer at all. We were so glad to be rid of
both that we never gave a thought to the consequences. When a prisoner
sees the door of his dungeon open, he dashes for it without stopping to
think where he shall get his dinner outside. The moment we found that we
could do without Shelley's almighty fiend intellectually, he went into
the gulf that seemed only a dustbin with a suddenness that made our own
lives one of the most astonishing periods in history. If I had told that
uncle of mine that within thirty years from the date of our conversation
I should be exposing myself to suspicions of the grossest superstition
by questioning the sufficiency of Darwin; maintaining the reality of the
Holy Ghost; declaring that the phenomenon of the Word becoming Flesh
was occurring daily, he would have regarded me as the most extravagant
madman our family had ever produced. Yet it was so. In 1906 I might
have vituperated Jehovah more heartily than ever Shelley did without
eliciting a protest in any circle of thinkers, or shocking any public
audience accustomed to modern discussion; but when I described Darwin
as 'an intelligent and industrious pigeon fancier,'