ance was due to the practical novelty and the profound
importance of the teaching itself, and to the fact that the
controversy about evolution quickly became much more public than any
controversy of equal seriousness had been for many generations.

We must not think lightly of that great disturbance because it has, in
some real sense, done its work, and because it is impossible in days
of more coolness and light, to recover a full sense of its very real
difficulties.

Those who would know them better should add to the calm records of
Darwin[228] and to the story of Huxley's impassioned championship, all
that they can learn of George Romanes.[229] For his life was absorbed
in this very struggle and reproduced its stages. It began in a certain
assured simplicity of biblical interpretation; it went on, through the
glories and adventures of a paladin in Darwin's train, to the darkness
and dismay of a man who saw all his most cherished beliefs rendered,
as he thought, incredible.[230] He lived to find the freer faith for
which process and purpose are not irreconcilable, but necessary to one
another. His development, scientific, intellectual and moral, was
itself of high significance; and its record is of unique value to our
own generation, so near the age of that doubt and yet so far from it;
certainly still much in need of the caution and courage by which past
endurance prepares men for new emergencies. We have little enough
reason to be sure that in the discussions awaiting us we shall do as
well as our predecessors in theirs. Remembering their endurance of
mental pain, their ardour in mental labour, the heroic temper and the
high sincerity of controversialists on either side, we may well speak
of our fathers in such words of modesty and self-judgment as Drayton
used when he sang the victors of Agincourt. The progress of biblical
study, in the departments of Introduction and Exegesis, resulting in
the recovery of a point of view anciently tolerated if not prevalent,
has altered some of the conditions of that discussion. In the years
near 1858, the witness of Scripture was adduced both by Christian
advocates and their critics as if unmistakably irreconcilable with
Evolution.

Huxley[231] found the path of the blameless naturalist everywhere
blocked by "Moses": the believer in revelation was generally held to
be forced to a choice between revealed cosmogony and the scientific
account of origins. It is not clear how far th