edit Christian faith, by the
apparent superiority of the new work to the feeble and unprogressive
knowledge of Christian believers! The day is coming when men of this
mental character and rank, of this curiosity, this energy and this
good fortune in investigation, will be employed in opening mysteries
of a spiritual nature. They will silence with masterful witness the
over-confident denials of naturalism. They will be in danger of the
widespread recognition which thirty years ago accompanied every
utterance of Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer. They will contribute, in spite
of adulation, to the advance of sober religious and moral science.

And this result will be due to Darwin, first because by raising the
dignity of natural science, he encouraged the development of the
scientific mind; secondly because he gave to religious students the
example of patient and ardent investigation; and thirdly because by
the pressure of naturalistic criticism the religious have been driven
to ascertain the causes of their own convictions, a work in which they
were not without the sympathy of men of science.[224]

In leaving the subject of scientific religious inquiry, I will only
add that I do not believe it receives any important help--and
certainly it suffers incidentally much damaging interruption--from the
study of abnormal manifestations or abnormal conditions of
personality.

(3) Both of the above effects seem to me of high, perhaps the very
highest, importance to faith and to thought. But, under the third
head, I name two which are more directly traceable to the personal
work of Darwin, and more definitely characteristic of the age in which
his influence was paramount: viz. the influence of the two conceptions
of evolution and natural selection upon the doctrine of creation and
of design respectively.

It is impossible here, though it is necessary for a complete sketch of
the matter, to distinguish the different elements and channels of this
Darwinian influence; in Darwin's own writings, in the vigourous
polemic of Huxley, and strangely enough, but very actually for popular
thought, in the teaching of the definitely anti-Darwinian evolutionist
Spencer.

Under the head of the directly and purely Darwinian elements I should
class as preeminent the work of Wallace and of Bates; for no two sets
of facts have done more to fix in ordinary intelligent minds a belief
in organic evolution and in natural selection as its guiding factor
than