at once to the
proper ecclesiastics, and the author was placed under the major
excommunication.

But all this opposition may be reckoned among the last expiring
convulsions of the old theologic theory. Even from the new Catholic
University at Washington has come an utterance in favour of the new
doctrine, and in other universities in the Old World and in the New the
doctrine of evolution by natural selection has asserted its right to
full and honest consideration. More than this, it is clearly evident
that the stronger men in the 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 1892 at the parish church of Rochdale,
Wilson, Archdeacon of Manchester, not only accepted Darwinism as true,
but wrought 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 Promotion of Christian Knowledge
which only a few years before 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.(24)

(24) For the causes of bitterness shown regarding the Darwinian
hypothesis, see Reusch, Bibel und Natur, vol. ii, pp. 46 et seq. For
hostility in the United States regarding 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; also
The Light by which we see Light, or Nature and the Scriptures, Vedder
Lectures, 1875, Rutgers College, New York, 1875; also