, Spencer, Wallace
and Asa Gray he had a great and profound love--what they said affected
him deeply, and their steadfast kindness at times touched him to tears.
For the great, seething, outside world that had not thought along
abstruse scientific lines, and could not, he cared little.

"How can we expect them to see as we do," he wrote to Gray; "it has
taken me thirty years of toil and research to come to these conclusions.
To have the unthinking masses accept all that I say would be calamity:
this opposition is a winnowing process, and all a part of the Law of
Evolution that works for good."

* * * * *

For forty years Darwin lived in the same house at Down, in the same
quiet, simple way. Here he lived and worked, and the world gradually
came to him, figuratively and literally. Gradually it dawned upon the
theologians that a God who could set in motion natural laws that worked
with beneficent and absolute regularity was just as great as if He had
made everything at once and then stopped.

The miracle of evolution is just as sublime as the miracle of Adam's
deep sleep and the making of a woman out of a man's rib. The faith of
the scientist who sees order, regularity and unfailing law is quite as
great as that of a preacher who believes everything he reads in a book.
The scientist is a man with faith, plus.

When Darwin died, in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-two, Darwinism and
infidelity were words no longer synonymous.

The discrepancies and inconsistencies of the theories of Darwin were
seen by him as by his critics, and he was ever willing to admit the
doubt. None of his disciples was as ready to modify his opinions as he.
"We must beware of making science dogmatic," he once said to Haeckel.

And at another time he said, "I would feel I had gone too far were it
not for Wallace, who came to the same conclusions, quite independently
of me." Darwin's mind was simple and childlike. He was a student,
always learning, and no one was too mean or too poor for him to learn
from. The patience, persistency and untiring industry of the man,
combined with the daring imagination that saw the thing clearly long
before he could prove it, and the gentle forbearance in the presence of
unkindness and misunderstanding, won the love of a nation.

He wished to be buried in the churchyard at Down, but at his death, by
universal acclaim, the gates of Westminster swung wide to receive the
dust of the man who