ians. Now, while Darwin rejects the idea of a sudden
appearance of a new species out of nothing--or, as he once expressed
himself in his "Origin of Species," the idea "that at innumerable periods
in the earth's history certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly
to flash into living tissues,"--and he is no doubt right in rejecting
it,--still at the same time he does not deny the dependence of the
successive origin of a new species on a divine author. But in calling that
process creation and this one not, he gives the appearance of an opposition
to the religious idea of creation--an appearance of which the greater part
of the guilt is borne by those theologians who define the idea of the
creation, even of a single form, in a manner which is only proper for the
idea of the first origin of the universe.

It is true, we could rank Darwin still more readily among the scientists
who are at peace with all the claims of religion, did he not in his
"Descent of Man," when enumerating the "excellent naturalists and
philosophers" who with him reduce the pedigree of man to lower forms,
mention names of men who in their works firmly unite Darwinism and monistic
naturalism or even materialism, and expressly protest against a separation
of their naturo-historical results and their philosophic points of view. We
mean Buechner and Haeckel. The latter's "Natural History of Creation," he
especially praises: "If this work had appeared before my essay had been
written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the
conclusions at which I have {220} arrived I find confirmed by this
naturalist," etc. The entire silence in regard to the anti-Christian
results which these two authors derive from their naturo-historical
premises, makes Darwin's own position in reference to religion again very
uncertain. It seems that Darwin in his theology is not only inclined to
theism, but, following the traditions of his countrymen of the last
century, to a quite cool and superficial deism, and that he permits himself
to be too much impressed by the anti-teleological deductions of many of his
followers, and to be induced to separate in his later publications the
Creator and his work more widely than he has done in the beginning. For
while in his "Origin of the Species," and in his "Descent of Man" he
nowhere contests a teleological view of nature, and rejects the idea of
single creations only under the erroneous supposition that the idea of t