Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/169

Rh earth and sea were made to bring forth birds and fishes, and man was created out of the dust of the ground. Men of broader mind like Kingsley and Farrar, and English and American broad churchmen generally, took ground directly in Darwin's favor. Even Whewell took pains to show that there might be such a thing as a Darwinian argument for design in Nature; and the Rev. Samuel Houghton, of the Royal Society, gave interesting suggestions of a teleological evolution.

Both the great English universities received the new teaching as a leaven; at Oxford, in the very front of the High Church party at Keble College, was elaborated a statement that the evolution doctrine is "an advance in our theological thinking"; and Temple, Bishop of London, perhaps the most influential thinker at present in the Anglican episcopate, accepted the new revelation in the following words: "It seems something more majestic, more befitting Him to whom a thousand years are as one day, thus to impress his will once for all on his creation, and provide for all the countless varieties by this one original impress, than by special acts of creation to be perpetually modifying what he had previously made."

In Scotland the Duke of Argyll, head and front of the orthodox party, dissenting in many respects from Darwin's full conclusions, made concessions which disorganized the old position.

Curiously enough, from the Roman Catholic Church, bitter as some of its writers had been, now came argument to prove that the Catholic faith does not prevent any one "from holding the Darwinian theory," and especially a declaration from an authority eminent among American Catholics—a declaration which has a very curious sound, but which it would be ungracious to find fault with—that "the doctrine of evolution is no more in opposition to the doctrine of the Catholic Church than is the Copernican theory or that of Galileo."

Here and there, indeed, men of science like Dawson, Mivart, and Wigand, in view of theological considerations, have sought to make conditions; but the current is too strong, and we find eminent theologians in every country ready to accept natural selection as at least a very important part in the mechanism of evolution.

At the death of Darwin it was felt that there was but one place in England where his body should be laid, and that this place was next the grave of Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. The noble address of Canon Farrar at his funeral was echoed from many pulpits in Europe and America, and theological opposition as such was ended. Occasionally there came, it is true, a survival of the old feeling; the Rev. Dr. Laing referred to the burial of Darwin in Westminster Abbey as "a proof that