stupendous and resistless weight.

I take this autobiographical way of referring to these things, in
the order in which they came before my mind, for the sake of
illustration. The net result of the whole is to put evolution in
harmony with religious thought,--not necessarily in harmony with
particular religious dogmas or theories, but in harmony with the
great religious drift, so that the antagonism which used to appear
to exist between religion and science is likely to disappear. So I
think it will before a great while. If you take the case of some
evolutionist like Professor Haeckel, who is perfectly sure that
materialism accounts for everything (he has got it all cut and
dried and settled; he knows all about it, so that there is really
no need of discussing the subject!); if you ask the question
whether it was his scientific study of evolution that really led
him to such a dogmatic conclusion, or whether it was that he
started from some purely arbitrary assumption, like the French
materialists of the eighteenth century, I have no doubt the latter
would be the true explanation. There are a good many people who
start on their theories of evolution with these ultimate questions
all settled to begin with. It was the most natural thing in the
world that after the first assaults of science upon old beliefs,
after a certain number of Bible stories and a certain number of
church doctrines had been discredited, there should be a school of
men who in sheer weariness should settle down to scientific
researches, and say, "We content ourselves with what we can prove
by the methods of physical science, and we will throw everything
else overboard." That was very much the state of mind of the
famous French atheists of the last century. But only think how
chaotic nature was to their minds compared to what she is to our