Page:Carroll Lane Fenton - Darwin and the Theory of Evolution.djvu/39

 36 And tails are the fashion—at night.

This origination

Is all speculation—

We gamble in various shapes;

So Mr. Darwin

May speculate in

Our ancestors having been apes.

The main contention of Darwin, that man was developed from a lower stock, and so on back to the beginning of life, is too well known today to deserve a great deal of comment. How much natural selection may have affected that development cannot yet be said with certainty—there are too many other possible factors of which we are just beginning to learn. In that time, however, it was less known, and even more apt to excite prejudice. The mere conclusion that the minds of man and the lower animals were very similar was enough to set the theologians agog with excitement; to them it was a direct thrust at the "godliness" of the human intellect.

Indeed, the preachers did have cause for alarm. Not only was Darwin's general conclusion as to man’s ancestry at direct variance with the tenets of "revealed" religion; some of his statements contradicted the strongest arguments on which religion is based. He sees no evidence that it had played, in the remote past, any important role in the development of humanity. "There is no evidence," he says, "that man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an omnipotent God." This was not, of course, a proclamation of atheism or agnosticism; it was not even a question as to the truth of the conception of a god, or of gods. Yet it would cause others to