In leaving the subject of scientific religious inquiry, I will only add
that I do not believe it receives any important help--and certainly
it suffers incidentally much damaging interruption--from the study of
abnormal manifestations or abnormal conditions of personality.
(3) Both of the above effects seem to me of high, perhaps the very
highest, importance to faith and to thought. But, under the third head,
I name two which are more directly traceable to the personal work of
Darwin, and more definitely characteristic of the age in which his
influence was paramount: viz. the influence of the two conceptions of
evolution and natural selection upon the doctrine of creation and of
design respectively.
It is impossible here, though it is necessary for a complete sketch of
the matter, to distinguish the different elements and channels of this
Darwinian influence; in Darwin's own writings, in the vigorous polemic
of Huxley, and strangely enough, but very actually for popular thought,
in the teaching of the definitely anti-Darwinian evolutionist Spencer.
Under the head of the directly and purely Darwinian elements I should
class as preeminent the work of Wallace and of Bates; for no two sets
of facts have done more to fix in ordinary intelligent minds a belief
in organic evolution and in natural selection as its guiding factor
than the facts of geographical distribution and of protective colour and
mimicry. The facts of geology were difficult to grasp and the public and
theologians heard more often of the imperfection than of the extent of
the geological record. The witness of embryology, depending to a great
extent upon microscopic work, was and is beyond the appreciation of
persons occupied in fields of work other than biology.