believed in the loudly-proclaimed connection of Darwinism with the
whole anti-Christian view of the world, and therefore protested immediately
against everything which is called Darwinism? Can we reproach theologians
for not immediately becoming scientists themselves, in order to form an
independent judgment in the question, when even the most eminent scientists
declared that amalgamation of the most heterogenetic as an inevitable
consequence of Darwinism, and as much as possible diminished or concealed
their want of harmony with a few other investigators who, although small in
number, yet by their weight counterbalanced dozens of names of the second
and third rank?

Thus we could read, in the journals of specialists, in pamphlets, in
religious and political journals, even in local newspapers, a great many
articles which were guilty of exactly the same confounding of the
scientific and the religious, and again of the scientific and the
philosophic, as those who had caused this confounding, and who, under the
supposition of this solidarity of wholly distinct things, attacked and
contested in the interest of religion, not only the anti-religious
conclusions of Darwinian philosophers, but also Darwinism as a merely
scientific theory, and rendered the contrast as strong as possible by
adhering to that above censured, unmotived, indefensible, and one-sided
conception of creation.

And although on the part of positive Christian theology there was a
gradually increasing number of voices {209} of those who in the idea of an
origin of species through _descent_ do not yet see an injury to the
theistic and Christian conception of God and creation, still as a rule this
concession was made only to the idea of descent, and not to that of
selection and to that which is properly called Darwinism. As a rule, in
most of the theological works which treat in general of the _Darwinian_
questions, Darwinism and opposition to the Christian conception of God and
creation were and are still taken as identical. For instance, Ebrard, in
the first part of his "Apologetik" ("Apologetics"), Guetersloh, Bertelsmann,
1874, enumerates among the systems which are opposed to Christianity, in
the same line with the doubtless anti-theistic and anti-Christian
_aposkopiology_ or negation of the idea of design, also the mechanistic
system, or the negation of the organic vital force, and the Darwinian
theory of descent. Besides, in reading his "Apologetics," w