Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/343

Rh of his position. There was a time when men dared to say that because the presence of sin veils the knowledge of God, therefore they who do not accept Christianity in a Christian country must be guilty of secret, if not open, sin. That phase, thank God, has passed. And then—that men might have a theory—they talked of intellectual pride. Intellectual pride, which is self-assertion, no doubt obscures the vision of God. It is as much a rejection of God as a sinful life is. But dare any one say that loss of faith or the inability to receive it must spring from one of these two causes—immorality or intellectual pride? We believe it is impossible to read Darwin's "Life and Letters" without noticing as the most striking characteristics of Darwin's mind his intense modesty, his self-forgetfulness, his shrinking from popularity or applause, while gladly welcoming the testimony of those who were competent to judge of the truth of his work, his devotion to truth as shown by the weight he gave to unfavorable facts, his humility, his simplicity, his reverence. How could such a lovable nature, we are tempted to ask, have rejected Christianity? or, to put it differently, how could Christianity have failed to make good its appeal to such a nature as this?

In the whole record there is nothing so intensely interesting as Darwin's account of his religious opinions and the steps by which he became an agnostic. What was his religious history? His mother was a Unitarian, his father he describes as "a freethinker in religious matters," though nominally belonging to the Church of England. Darwin himself was christened and was meant to belong to the Church, but he was sent to a day-school kept by the Unitarian minister. His mother attended the Unitarian chapel and took her sons with her. She died when he was eight years old, and after that he seems to have gone to church, and later on we hear of his intention of "going into the Church" —an intention which was not abandoned till the Beagle voyage. His view of the ministry is incidentally given in a letter from Lima in 1835: "To a person fit to take the office the life of a clergyman is a type of all that is respectable and happy." During all this period he "had not thought much about the existence of a personal God." He had read Paley, but had taken Paley's premises "on trust," so that even his Unitarianism, which, as he tells us, his grandfather spoke of as "a feather-bed for a falling Christian," was hardly enough to break the fall. Under such conditions we are not surprised to hear that the intention to be a clergyman "died a natural death." That idea abandoned, the two props on which his religion rested—Paley's "Natural Theology" and Pearson "On the Creed"—gradually gave way. The Paleyan argument disappeared with the abandonment of special