Thomas Carlyle could see nothing in it but an
atheistic theory, a gospel of dirt: "I have known
three generations of Darwin's, atheists all. . . . Ah!
it is a sad and terrible thing to see nigh a whole
generation of men and women professing to be cul-
tivated, looking around in a purblind fashion and
finding no God in this universe. . . . And this
is what we have got; all things from frog-spawn;
the gospel of dirt the order of the day."

Such a view can arise only from the most funda-
mental misconception of the doctrine of evolution.
It neither affirms nor denies the existence of a God;
it deals only with processes and does not profess to
touch the question of ultimate causation. It is no
more atheistic to believe that individuals and spe-
cies originally came into existence according to the
natural law of development or evolution than it is
to believe that individuals now come into the world
according to this law. If the evolution of the spe-
cies is an atheistic doctrine, so is the development of
the individual. "Evolution," said Prof. Tyndall,
"does not solve nor profess to solve the ultimate
mystery of this universe. It leaves, in fact, that
mystery untouched." Darwin, himself, held that
the theory was quite compatible with the belief in
a God; and in one of his last letters, he wrote: ^* "I
have never been an atheist in the sense of denying
the existence of God."

-210-