le begins anew, and when the favoring peculiarities become more
pronounced in some, (by chance, of course) these in turn win out. Thus
Nature gradually improves her various breeds through the continued
action of a self-regulating mechanism. Such are the main features of
Darwinism, its real kernel, about which of course,--and this is a proof
of its insufficiency,--from the very beginning a number of auxiliary
hypotheses attached themselves.

Darwin's theory sounds so clear and simple, and seems at first blush so
luminous that it is no wonder if many careful naturalists regarded it
as an incontrovertible truth. The warning voice of the more prudent men
of science was silenced by the loud enthusiasm of the younger
generation over the solution of the greatest of the world-problems: the
genesis of living beings had been brought to light, and--a thing which
admitted of no doubt--man as well as the brute creation was a product
of purely natural evolution. The doctrine which materialism had already
proclaimed with prophetic insight, had at length been irrefragably
established on a scientific basis: God, Soul and Immortality were
contemptuously relegated to the domain of nursery tales. What further
use was there for a God when, in addition to the Kant-Laplacian theory
of the origin of the planetary system, it had been discovered that
living organisms had likewise evolved spontaneously? How could man who
had sprung from the irrational brute possess a soul? And thus, finally,
disappeared the third delusion, the hope of immortality. For with death
the functions of the body simply cease, as also do those of the brain,
which people had foolishly believed to be something more than an
aggregation of atoms. The body dissolves into its constituent elements
and serves in its turn to build up other organisms: but as a human body
it all turns to dust nor 'leaves a wrack behind'. Thus Darwinism was
made the basis first for a materialistic, and then for a monistic, view
of the world, and hence came to be rigorously opposed to every form of
Theism. But since, at that time, Darwinism was the only theory of
evolution recognized by the world of science, the opposition of the
Christian world was directed not specifically against Darwinism, but
against the theory of evolution as such. The wheat was rooted up with
the tares.

I will not discuss here which of the two views concerning creation; the
origin of the world in one moment of time, or a grad