Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/166

152 tendencies of the Darwinian theory were "toward infidelity" but declined to make any serious battle on biblical grounds; the Jesuit, Father Pesch, in Holland, drew. up in Latin in due array, after the old scholastic manner, a sort of general indictment of evolution, of which one must say that it was interesting—as interesting as the display of a troop in chain armor and with crossbows on a nineteenth-century battlefield.

From America there came new echoes. Among the myriad attacks on the Darwinian theory by Catholics and Protestants two should be especially mentioned. The first of these was by Dr. Noah Porter, President of Yale College, an excellent scholar, an interesting writer, a noble man, broadly tolerant, combining in his thinking a curious mixture of radicalism and conservatism. While giving great latitude to the evolutionary teaching in the university under his care, he felt it his duty upon one occasion to avow his disbelief in it; but he was very careful not to suggest any necessary antagonism between it and the Scriptures. He confined himself mainly to pointing out the tendency of the evolution doctrine in this form toward agnosticism and pantheism. To those who knew and loved him and had noted the genial way in which by wise neglect he had allowed scientific studies to flourish at Yale, there was an amusing side to all this. Within a stone's throw of his college rooms was the Museum of Paleontology, in which Prof. Marsh had laid side by side, among other evidences of the new truth, that wonderful series of specimens showing the evolution of the horse from the earliest form of the animal, "not larger than a fox, with five toes," through the whole series up to his present form and size—that series which the most eminent living exponent of the Darwinian view has declared an absolute proof of the existence of natural selection as an agent in evolution. In spite of the veneration and love which all Yale men felt for President Porter, it was hardly to be expected that these particular arguments of his would have much permanent effect upon them when there was constantly before their eyes so convincing a refutation.

But a far more determined and bitter opponent was the Rev. Dr. Hodge, of Princeton; his anger toward the evolution doctrine seemed to madden him: he declared it thoroughly "atheistic"; he insisted that Christians "have a right to protest against the arraying of probabilities against the clear evidence of the Scriptures"; he even censured so orthodox a writer as the Duke of Argyll, and declared that the Darwinian theory of natural selection is "utterly inconsistent with the Scriptures," and that "an absent God, who does nothing, is to us no God"; that "to ignore design as manifested in God's creation is a theory which attempts to dethrone God"; that "a denial of design in Nature is virtually