of an enlightened individual. The truth
however remains, that the Jewish spirit can still be a factor in this
world, making for the highest science, for unending progress; and that
the mission of the Bible is not yet complete. The Bible is not
responsible for the partial miscarriage of Christianity, due to the
compromises made by its organizers, who, in their too great zeal to
conquer and convert Paganism, were themselves converted by it. But
everything in Christianity which comes in a direct line from Judaism
lives, and will live; and it is Judaism which through Christianity has
cast into the old polytheistic world, to ferment there until the end of
time, the sentiment of unity, and an impatience to bring about charity
and justice. The reign of the Bible, and also of the Evangelists in so
far as they were inspired by the Bible, can become established only in
proportion as the positive religions connected with it lose their
power. Great religions outlive their altars and their priests.
Hellenism, abolished, counts less skeptics to-day than in the days of
Socrates and Anaxagoras. The gods of Homer died when Phidias carved them
in marble, and now they are immortally enthroned in the thought and
heart of Europe. The Cross may crumble into dust, but there were words
spoken under its shadow in Galilee, the echo of which will forever
vibrate in the human conscience. And when the nation who made the Bible
shall have disappeared,--the race and the cult,--though leaving no
visible trace of its passage upon earth, its imprint will remain in the
depth of the heart of generations, who will, unconsciously perhaps, live
upon what has thus been implanted in their breasts. Humanity, as it is
fashioned in the dreams of those who desire to be called freethinkers,
may with the lips deny the Bible and its work; but humanity can never
deny it in its heart, without the sacrifice of the best that it
contains, faith in unity and hope for justice, and without a relapse
into the mythology and the "might makes right" of thirty centuries ago.

CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN

(1809-1882)

BY E. RAY LANKESTER

[Illustration: CHAS. R. DARWIN]

Charles Robert Darwin, the great naturalist and author of the "Darwinian
theory," was the son of Dr. Robert Waring Darwin (1766-1848) and
grandson of Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). He was born at Shrewsbury on
February 12th, 1809. W. E. Gladstone, Alfred Tennyson, and Abraham
Lincoln were born in the same ye