out of that wide and accurate reading which so
frequently astonished his friends, and with that penetrating dialectic
of his, opened my eyes to certain fallacies in Darwin's argument,
especially to the fatal weakness of the chapter on Instinct. The
reading of St. George Mivart's book "The Genesis of Species" later
convinced me of the accuracy of my uncle's judgment. But the fascination
of the subject persisted, and for a time Herbert Spencer's "Synthetic
Philosophy," by the comprehensiveness of its induction and its vast
array of data, exercised its thrall. Alfred Russel Wallace's
"Darwinism," Huxley's "Lectures on Evolution," Tyndall's "The Beginning
of Things," Grant Allen's "The Evolutionist at Large," Eimer's
"Orthogenesis," Clodd's "Story of Creation," occupied me in turn, until
the apodictic presentation of John Fiske's Essays on Darwinism, no less
than the open and haggard opposition to Christianity which prevails in
Huxley's "Science and Hebrew Tradition" and in Spencer's chapters on
"The Unknowable" (so the Synthetic Philosophy denominates God), caused
a revulsion of sentiment,--the anti-religious bias of evolution
standing forth the clearer to my mind, the longer I occupied myself with
the subject.

I determined to investigate for myself the data on which the
speculations whose mazes I had trod these years were built up. The
leisure hours of three years were devoted to the study of first-hand
sources of Comparative Religion. The result of this research was
deposited in two articles contributed to the _Theological Quarterly_ in
1906 and 1907. I fear that the forbidding character of the foot-notes
served as an effective deterrent to the reading of these articles. I
have now given, in several chapters of this little volume, in popular
language the argument against evolution to be derived from the study of
Religion. The reading of Le Conte's and Dana's text-books of geology
and various other treatises supplied the data on palaeontology embodied
in the first chapters of the book. The notable circulus in concludendo
("begging the question") of which evolutionists here are guilty was
first pointed out to me by Prof. Tingelstad of Decorah, Iowa, who was
in 1908 taking a course in Evolution at Chicago University, and who
called on me for discussion of the doctrine as he received it from
"head-quarters."

An an excursus in the subject of Pedagogy, I have treated in my
Seminary lectures the past years, under the head