Like

most public characters, and men of science, he avoided religious discu ion, recognising no solid basis or utility in such controversies. His Origin of Species was first published in 1859, and subsequently revised and improved. On March 29th, 1863, we find him writing to a friend to say: “I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal term ‘creation,’ by which T really meant ‘appeared by some wholly unknown proce ’” In the work itself he says that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” (as indeed it was by his Descent of Man in 1871); but this was disconcerting to those who believed they knew all the facts, though he hopes that it ‘will not shock the religious opinions of anyone.” He thanked Dr Carpenter in 1859 for a review in the Edinburgh, but deprecates controversy as it “pains one’s female relations, and injures the cause” of science. But in pulling down the ancient structure stone by stone he gradually became bolder, and in 1879 he wrote to a young student of Jena to say: “I am very busy, and am an old man in delicate health, and am not able to answer your letters fully, even a uming that they can be answered at all, Science and Christ have nothing to do with each other, except in so far as the habit of scientific investigation makes a man cautious in accepting any proofs, As far as I am concerned I do not believe that any revelation has eyer been made, With regard to a future life every one must draw his own conclusions from vague and contradictory probabilities.” We also find him asking himself such questions as these: “Is it credible, if God were now to make a revelation to the Hindus, that he would connect it with a belief in Vishnu and Siva, as Christianity is — connected with the Old Testament?” In 1881 he wrote that the The is tik argument, from the supposed “innate idea of God,” could — only have weight if all had the same conviction as to the existence of one and the same deity. “With me,” he writes, “the horrid doubt — in regard to a God is, that our convictions are untrustworthy, our — minds being but developments from lower animals. How could one — trust to the convictions of a monkey?” These doubts appear to have troubled him as early as 1861, In 1881 neither the awful grandeur of earthly and starry scenes, nor the universal existence of law and order in the universe, with its vast complexity—the infinitely great and infinitely small—could sway his logical and scientific mind. 545