uld be entertained, but our future action should rest on a
broad, settled policy founded upon justice, tempered by moderation,
keeping in view the great work of banishing uninvited poverty, and
elevating to a higher level the great struggling millions without for a
moment sacrificing individualism. Indeed, a truer democracy in which a
higher interpretation of justice, and a broader conception of individual
freedom, and a more sacred regard for liberty, should be the watchword
of the future.

EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY.

BY PROF. JAS. T. BIXBY, PH. D.

In the life and letters of Charles Darwin there is a memorandum, copied
from his pocket note-book of 1837, to this effect:--"In July, opened
first notebook on Transmutation of Species. Had been greatly struck with
the character of the South American fossils and the species on Galapagos
Archipelago."

These facts, he says, were the origin of all his epoch-making views as
to the development of life and the work of natural selection in evolving
species.

His suspicions that species were not immutable and made at one cast,
directly by the fiat of the Creator, seemed to him, at first, he says,
almost like murder.

To the greater part of the church, when in 1859, after twenty years of
work in accumulating the proofs of his theory, he at last gave it to the
world, it seemed quite as bad as murder.

It is very interesting now to look back upon the history and career of
the Darwinian theory in the last thirty years; to recall, first the
fierce outcry and denunciation it elicited, then the gradual
accumulation of corroboratory evidence from all quarters in its favor;
the accession of one scientific authority after another to the new
views; the softening, little by little, of ecclesiastical opposition;
its gradual acceptance by the broad-minded alike in theological and
scientific circles; then, in these recent years, the exaltation of the
new theory into a scientific and philosophic creed, wherein matter,
force, and evolution constitute the new trinity, which, unless the
modern man piously believes, he becomes anathematized and excommunicated
by all the priests of the new dogmatism.

In the field of science, undoubtedly, evolution has won the day.
Nevertheless, in religious circles, old time prejudices and slow
conservatism, clinging to its creeds, as the hermit crab clings to the
cast-off shell of oyster or clam, still resist it. The great body of the
Christian la