Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/805

Rh as involving others which really invade the domain of science and tend to cast uncertainty upon its methods and results.

In seeking to account for "the modern spread of agnosticism," the bishop finds that it is to "the widely-spread popularity of the theory of evolution, leading as it does to materialism," that the phenomenon is to be attributed. Consequently the theory of evolution must be destroyed. The Episcopal edict has gone forth, and the Episcopal batteries are raised against this later Carthage of infidelity. But, alas! it does not sufficiently appear that the right reverend director of the siege understands either the nature of the task he has undertaken or the significance which would attach to success could he achieve it. To take the latter point first: science was making very rapid progress before the evolution theory had acquired any wide popularity, before in fact anything was known of it outside of one or two speculative treatises; and already the opposition of science to a scheme which makes this earth the theatre of miracle-working power was well marked. Twenty-two years ago, when "The Origin of Species" was but two years old, and had still a great deal of opposition to encounter even from men of science, before even the term evolution had any currency in the special sense it now bears, a leading prelate of the Church of England, Bishop Wilberforce, discerned a skeptical movement "too wide-spread and connecting itself with far too general conditions" to be explained otherwise than as "the first stealing over the sky of the lurid lights which shall be shed profusely around the great Antichrist." To charge the present intellectual state of the world, therefore, on the doctrine of evolution is to ignore that general movement of thought which, before the idea of evolution was a factor of any importance in modern speculation, had already, as the Bishop of Oxford testified, carried thousands away from their old theological habitations, and which, with or without the theory of evolution, was quite adapted to produce the state of things which we see to-day in the intellectual world.

The doctrine of evolution is simply the form in which the dominant scientific thought of the day is cast. As a working hypothesis it presents very great advantages; and the thinkers of to-day would find it hard to dispense with the aid it affords. But supposing it could be shown that the doctrine, as at present conceived, was untenable what then? Would men of science at once abandon their belief in the invariability of natural law and fly back to mediæval superstitions? By no means. If there is any class of men who have learned the lesson that the spider taught to Bruce, it is the class of scientific workers. Destroy one of their constructions and they set to work again, with unconquerable industry, to build another. In fact, they are always testing and trying their own constructions; and we may be sure that if the evolution theory is ever to be swept away it will