eople.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mill: _Three Essays on Religion_ (Holt), pp. 28-30.]

The theology which insists on the patent and ubiquitous
evidences of God's beneficent purpose, attempts, as already
pointed out, to demonstrate that purpose in the history of
mankind. Orthodox Christian doctrine, for example, insists
that man has been especially created by God, as were the
other animals each after their kind, and that man's ultimate
and unique destiny is salvation through God's grace. Man
was created in perfection in the Garden of Eden, sinned, and
will, through God's mercy, find eventual redemption.

Following the publication of Darwin's _Origin of Species_, in
1859, the rapid spread of evolutionary doctrine aroused violent
opposition on the part of Christian thinkers and devout
Christians generally. In the first place it conflicted sharply
with the orthodox version of special creation. Secondly, it
made more difficult the insistence on marks of design or purpose
in Nature. These two points will be clearer after a brief
consideration of the nature of Darwinian evolution, with
whose thoroughgoing mechanical principles nineteenth-century
theology came most bitterly in conflict. The theory
explains the origins of species, somewhat as follows:

The variety of species now current developed out of simpler
forms of animal life, from which they are lineally descended.
Their present forms and structures are modifications from the
common forms possessed by their remote ancestors. These
modifications are, in the stricter forms of Darwinian evolution,
explained in mechanical terms by the theory of the "survival
of the fittest." That is, those animals with variations
adapted to their environment survive; those without, perish.
In consequence when any individual in a species happens to be
born with a variation specially adapted to its environment, in
the sharp "struggle for existence" that characterizes animal
life in a state of nature, it alone will be able to survive and
reproduce its kind. All the variations of species current are,
therefore, examples of this continuous process of descent with
adaptive modifications. The origin of the human species
came about through just such a variation or mutation from
one of the higher mammals (we have reason to believe, a
species similar to that of the anthrapoid ape). Man's
ancestry, it seems, from the scientific evidence which has been
marshaled, may be traced back biologically, in an alm