dowed with an amount of
combativeness which (though you have often and justly rebuked it)
may stand you in good stead.

"I am sharpening my claws and beak in readiness."

Huxley was absolutely right in his prediction as to the magnitude of
the prejudices to be overcome before evolution became accepted, and
for the next thirty years of his life he was the leader in the battle
for Darwinism. It was natural that the new views, especially in their
extension to man himself, should arouse the keenest opposition. To
those of the present generation, who have grown up in an atmosphere
impregnated by the doctrine of descent, the position of the world in
1860 seems "older than a tale written in any book." As we have tried
to shew in the preceding chapter, biological science was partially
prepared; the mutability of species and the orderly succession of
organic life were in the air. But the application of the doctrine to
man came as a greater shock to civilised sentiment than would have
occurred a century earlier. It came as a disaster even to the clearest
and calmest intellects, for it seemed to drag down to the dirt the
nobility of man. Out of the fierce flame of the French Revolution,
there had come purged and clean the conception of man as an individual
and soul. As this century advanced, the conception of the dignity and
worth of each individual man, rich or poor, bond or free, had spread
more and more widely, bearing as its fruit the emancipation of slaves,
the spread of political freedom, the amelioration of the conditions of
the dregs of humanity, the right of all to education, the possibility
of universal peace based on the brotherhood of man; and all that was
best in philosophy and in political practice seemed bound up with a
lofty view of the unit of mankind. Carlyle himself, to whom many of
the freest and noblest spirits in Europe were beginning to look as to
an inspired prophet, could see in it nothing but a "monkey
damnification of mankind." The dogmatic world saw in it nothing but a
deliberate and malicious assault upon religion. The Church of England
in particular was beginning to recover from a long period of almost
incredible supineness, and there was arising a large body of clergy
full of faith and zeal and good works, but quite unacquainted with
science, who frankly regarded Darwin as Antichrist, and Huxley and
Tyndall as emissaries of the devil. Against evolutionists there was
left unused no w