ontention, the very word Theology must be discarded, since there
would be no longer any need for it, or justification of its use.

But there was yet a further criticism that was supposed by not a few to
complete the discomfiture of those who still clung to the traditional
beliefs. We can find it forcibly expressed in one of the earlier
writings of Romanes, who in this case was endorsing the verdict of
Mill. "Supposing the Deity to be {34} omnipotent, there can be no
inference more transparent than that such wholesale suffering, for
whatever ends designed, exhibits an incalculably greater deficiency of
beneficence in the divine character than that which we know in any, the
very worst, of human characters. For let us pause for one moment to
think of what suffering in Nature means. Some hundreds of millions of
years ago, some millions of millions of animals must be supposed to
have become sentient. Since that time till the present there must have
been millions and millions of generations of millions and millions of
individuals. And throughout all this period of incalculable duration,
this inconceivable host of sentient organisms have been in a state of
unceasing battle, dread, ravin, pain. Looking to the outcome, we find
that more than one-half of the species which have survived the
ceaseless struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient
forms of life feasting on higher and sentient forms; we find teeth and
talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers moulded for
torment--everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, sickness, with oozing
blood and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence
that dimly close in deaths of cruel torture!"[8]

{35}

Huxley, arguing to the same effect, concluded that "since thousands of
times a minute, were our ears sharp enough, we should hear sighs and
groans of pain like those heard by Dante at the gate of hell, the world
cannot be governed by what we call benevolence."[9]

Haeckel went so far as to propose to describe by the term
"dysteleology" that part of the science of Biology which collected the
facts that gave direct contradiction to the idea of beneficial
"purposive arrangement."

Such were the difficulties which loomed largest before the minds of
vast numbers of thinking men and women, and did much to shake the
general confidence in religion, in the years that followed the
discoveries which culminated in the Darwinian theory of evolution. It
mu