Church have, in these latter days, not only relinquished the struggle against science in this field, but have determined frankly and manfully to make an alliance with it. In two very remarkable lectures given in 1893 at the parish church of Rochdale, Wilson, Archdeacon of Manchester, not only accepts Darwinism as true, but works it with great argumentative power into a higher view of Christianity; and what is of great significance, these sermons were published by the same Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge which only a few years previously had published the most bitter attacks against the Darwinian theory. So, too during the year 1893, Prof. Henry Drummond, whose praise is in all the dissenting churches, developed a similar view most brilliantly in a series of lectures delivered before the American Chautauqua Schools, and published in one of the most widespread of English orthodox newspapers.
Whatever additional factors may be added to natural selection-and Darwin himself fully admitted that there might be others the theory of an evolution process in the formation of the universe and of animated Nature is established, and the old theory of direct creation is gone forever. In place of it science has given us conceptions far more noble, and opened the way to an argument for design infinitely more beautiful than any ever developed by theology.[1]
- ↑ For reasons of the bitterness shown regarding the Darwinian hypothesis, see Reusch, Bibel und Natur, vol. ii, pp. 46 et seq. For hostility in the United States toward the Darwinian theory, see among a multitude of writers the following: Dr. Charles Hodge of Princeton, monograph. What is Darwinism? New York, 1874; also his Systematic Theology New York, 1872, vol. ii, part 2, Anthropology. For a laudatory notice of the Rev. E F Burr's demolition of evolution in his book Pater Mundi, see Monthly Religious Magazine Boston, May, 1873, p. 492; also The Light by which we see Light, or Nature and the Scriptures, Vedder Lectures, 1875, Rutgers College, New York, 1875; also Positivism and Evolutionism, in the American Catholic Quarterly, October, 1877, pp. 607, 619; and m the same number. Professor Huxley and Evolution, by Rev. A. M. Kirsch, pp. 662, 664; The Logic of Evolution, by Prof. Edward F. X. McSweeney, D. D., July, 1879, p. 561; Das Hexaemeron und die Geologic, von P. Eirich, Pastor in Albany, N. Y., Lutherischer Concordia-Verlag, St. Louis, Mo., 1878, pp. 81, 82, 84, 92-94; Evolutionism respecting Man and the Bible, by John T. Duffield, of Princeton, January, 1878, Princeton Review, pp. 151 163 154 158 159, 160, 188; A Lecture on Evolution, before the Nineteenth Century Club of New York' May 25, 1886, by ex-President Noah Porter, pp. 4, 26-29; Evolution or Not, extract in the New York Weekly Sun, October 24, 1888, concerning the removal of Rev. Dr James Woodrow, Professor of Natural Science in the Columbia Theological Seminary. For the dealings of Spanish ecclesiastics with Dr. Chil and his Darwinian exposition see the Revue d'Anthropologie, cited in the Academy for April 6, 1878; see also the Catholic World xix, 433, A Discussion with an Infidel, directed against Dr. Louis Büchner and his Kraft und Stoff; also in Mind and Matter, by Rev. James Tait, of Canada, p. 66; m the third edition the author bemoans the "horrible plaudits" that "have accompanied every effort to establish man's brutal descent"; also The Church Journal, New York, May 28, 1874 For the effort in favor of a theological evolution, see Rev. Samuel Houghton, F. R. S.,
