The reply came from Huxley, who said in substance:
"If I had to choose, I would prefer to be a descendant of a humble
monkey rather than of a man who employs his knowledge and eloquence
in misrepresenting those who are wearing out their lives in the
search for truth."
This shot reverberated through England, and indeed through
other countries.
The utterances of this the most brilliant prelate of the Anglican
Church received a sort of antiphonal response from the leaders of
the English Catholics. In an address before the "Academia," which
had been organized to combat "science falsely so called," Cardinal
Manning declared his abhorrence of the new view of Nature, and
described it as "a brutal philosophy--to wit, there is no God, and
the ape is our Adam."
These attacks from such eminent sources set the clerical fashion
for several years. One distinguished clerical reviewer, in spite of
Darwin's thirty years of quiet labour, and in spite of the
powerful summing up of his book, prefaced a diatribe by saying
that Darwin "might have been more modest had he given some slight
reason for dissenting from the views generally entertained.
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