Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/170

156 is no longer a Christian country," and added that this burial was a desecration—that this honor was given him because he had been "the chief promoter of the mock doctrine of evolution of the species and ape descent of man"; and this was echoed in Scotland by the Rev. Dr. Lee, who was pleased to call Darwin and his followers "gospelers of the gutter."

Still another of these belated prophets was, of all men, Thomas Carlyle. Soured and embittered, in the same spirit which led him to find more heroism in a marauding Viking or in one of Frederick the Great's generals than in Washington, or Lincoln, or Grant, and which caused him to see in the American civil war only "the burning out of a foul chimney," he simply saw in Darwin an "apostle of dirt worship."

The last echoes of this sort of utterance reverberated between Scotland and America. In the former country, in 1885, the Rev. Dr. Lee issued a volume in which it was declared that, if the Darwinian view be true, "there is no place for God"; that "by no method of interpretation can the language of Holy Scripture be made wide enough to re-echo the orang-outang theory of man's natural history"; that "Darwinism reverses the revelation of God" and "implies utter blasphemy against the divine and human character of our Incarnate Lord." In one of the intellectual centers of America the editor of a periodical called The Christian urged frantically that "the battle be set in array, and that men find out who is on the Lord's side and who is on the side of the Devil and the monkeys."

To the honor of the Church of England it should be recorded that a considerable number of its truest men opposed such utterances as these, and that one of them—Farrar, Archdeacon of Westminster—made a protest worthy to be held in perpetual remembrance. While confessing his own inability to accept fully the new scientific belief, he said: "We should consider it disgraceful and humiliating to try to shake it by an ad captandum argument, or by a claptrap platform appeal to the unfathomable ignorance and unlimited arrogance of a prejudiced assembly. We should blush to meet it with an anathema or a sneer."

All opposition had availed nothing; Darwin's work and fame were secure. As men looked back over his beautiful life—simple, honest, tolerant, kindly—and thought upon the great truth he had given to mankind, all the attacks faded into nothingness.

There were indeed some dark spots, which as time goes on appear darker. At Trinity College, Cambridge, Whewell, the "omniscient," author of the History of the Inductive Sciences, refused to allow a copy of the Origin of Species to be placed in the library. At multitudes of institutions under theological control—Catholic as well as Protestant—attempts were made to