Here is a man, trained by his
father to hate priests, brought up from his cradle in an atmosphere of
Freethought, and owing nothing to the Church; yet he becomes an
eminent scientist, a fervid patriot, an educational reformer, a leading
statesman, a tender husband and father, and a warm friend of the best
men, of his time; and on his decease the State gives him a public
funeral and provides for his widow and children. The man, we repeat, was
an open, nay a militant Atheist; and again we ask, What do the clergy
make of this phenomenon?

During his lifetime Darwin was the _bete noir_ of the clergy. They hated
him with a perfect and very natural hatred, for his scientific doctrines
were revolutionary, and if he was right they and their Bible were
certainly wrong. The Black Army denounced his impious teachings from
thousands of pulpits. With some of them he was the Great Beast, with
others Antichrist himself. And they were all the madder because he never
took the slightest notice of them, but treated them with the silent
contempt which a master of the hounds bestows on the village curs
who bark at his horse's heels. Yet, strange to say, when Darwin died,
instead of being buried in some quiet Kentish cemetery or churchyard, he
was actually sepulchred in Westminster Abbey. Having fought the living
Darwin tooth and nail, the clergy quietly appropriated the dead Darwin.
The living, thinking and working man was a damnable heretic, hated of
God and his priests, but his corpse was a very good Christian, and it
was buried in a temple of the very faith he had undermined. Darwin, with
all his gravity, is said to have loved a joke, and really this was so
good a joke that he might almost have grinned at it in his coffin.

By and bye, the great naturalist may figure as an ardent devotee of the
creed he rejected. The clergy are hypocritical and base enough--as a
body we mean--to claim Darwin himself now they have secured his corpse.
Who knows that, in another twenty years, the verger or even the Dean of
Westminster Abbey, in showing visitors through the place, may not say
before a certain tomb, "Here is the last resting-place of that eminent
Christian, Charles Darwin. There was a little misunderstanding between
him and the clergy while he lived, but it has all passed away like a
mist, and he is now accounted one of the chief pillars of the Church"?

What the clergy have done in the concrete with Darwin they have done in
the abstract w