uestions with which he has no real acquaintance, only
to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of
his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digression and a
skilful appeal to religious prejudices." Captain Fitz-Roy, who was
present at this meeting, was also called for.

He was now Admiral Fitz-Roy, and felt compelled to uphold his employer,
the State, so he upheld the State Religion and backed up the Bishop of
Oxford in his emptiness. "I often had occasion on board the 'Beagle' to
reprove Mr. Darwin for his disbelief in the First Chapter of Genesis,"
solemnly said the Admiral. And Francis Darwin writes it down without
comment, probably to show how much the Volunteer Naturalist was helped,
aided and inspired by the Captain of the Expedition.

But the reply of Huxley was a shot heard round the world, and for the
most part the echo was passed along by the enemy.

Huxley had insulted the Church, they said, and the adherents of the
Mosaic account took the attitude of outraged and injured innocence.

As for himself, Darwin said nothing. He ceased to attend the meetings of
the scientific societies, for fear that he would be drawn into debate,
and while he felt a sincere gratitude for Huxley's friendship, he
deprecated the stern rebuke to the Bishop of Oxford. "It will arouse the
opposition to greater unreason," he said. And this was exactly what
happened.

Even the English Catholics took sides with Wilberforce, the Protestant,
and Cardinal Manning organized a society "to fight this new, so-called
science that declares there is no God and that Adam was an ape."

Even the Non-Conformists and Jews came in, and there was the very
peculiar spectacle witnessed of the Church of England, the
Non-Conformists, the Catholics and the Jews aroused and standing as one
man, against one quiet villager who remained at home and said, "If my
book can not stand the bombardment, why then it deserves to go down and
to be forgotten."

Spurgeon declared that Darwinism was more dangerous than open and avowed
infidelity, since "the one motive of the whole book is to dethrone God."

Rabbi Hirschberg wrote, "Darwin's volume is plausible to the unthinking
person; but a deeper insight shows a mephitic desire to overthrow the
Mosaic books and to bury Judaism under a mass of fanciful rubbish."

In America Darwin had no more persistent critic than the Reverend DeWitt
Talmage. For ten years Doctor Talmage scarcely