afterwards Herbert Spencer published an essay in favour of evolution; and in 1858 Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace gave birth to a definite theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1859 Darwin published his "Origin of Species," and Spencer, Wallace, Huxley, Gallon, Tylor, Lubbock, and Lewes in England, and a large number of equally distinguished authorities in France and Germany, followed up the attack. A shower of theological diatribes followed, led by Wilberforce in the Quarterly Review and Manning in the Catholic Academia; it was called "a brutal philosophy," an "attempt to dethrone God," a "jungle of fanciful assumption," a "huge imposture"—an eminent French prelate, the amiable Mgr. Segur, said, referring to the doctrines of the Darwinists: "Their father is pride, their mother impurity, their offspring revolutions." From end to end of the Church (or Churches) the loudest artillery boomed. Science persevered: in 1864 Sir Charles Lyell, hitherto faithful, published his "Antiquity of Man," and seceded to the evolutionists; a few years later Huxley published his "Man's Place in Nature," and in 1871 appeared Darwin's "Descent of Man." The theological artillery continued, but a change of tactics was perceptible: a careful study of the Hebrew text was now supposed to permit a much broader interpretation than tradition had given. Darwinism was now rarely denounced as anti-scriptural, but as "an utterly unsupported hypo thesis," as "reckless and unscientific." Broad Churchmen, like Kingsley and Farrar, spoke in favour of Darwin; Bishop Temple and others began to accept Darwinism and give it a teleological consecration: Mivart did the same for Roman Catholics: Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey with a panegyric from Canon Farrar. There was still from time to time an erratic explosion in high circles: Carlyle, with his hybrid theism, railed at Darwin as an "apostle of dirt worship," and Whewell refused to admit a copy of "The Origin of Species" in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. But the opposition has now almost subsided; only third-rate theologians, decaying statesmen, and lady-novelists still echo the dying cry. The origin of species by evolution (whatever factors of that evolution may be ultimately assigned) is an accepted and a luminous theory of science; the doctrine of special creations is abandoned. In our own
