Marsh had laid
side by side, among other evidences of the new truth, that
wonderful series of specimens showing the evolution of the horse
from the earliest form of the animal, "not larger than a fox, with
five toes," through the whole series up to his present form and
size--that series which Huxley declared an absolute proof of the
existence of natural selection as an agent in evolution. In spite
of the veneration and love which all Yale men felt for President
Porter, it was hardly to be expected that these particular
arguments of his would have much permanent effect upon them when
there was constantly before their eyes so convincing a refutation.
But a far more determined opponent was the Rev. Dr. Hodge, of
Princeton; his anger toward the evolution doctrine was bitter: he
denounced it as thoroughly "atheistic"; he insisted that Christians
"have a right to protest against the arraying of probabilities
against the clear evidence of the Scriptures"; he even censured
so orthodox a writer as the Duke of Argyll, and declared that the
Darwinian theory of natural selection is "utterly inconsistent
with the Scriptures," and that "an absent God, who does nothing,
is to us no God"; that "to ignore design as manifested in God's
creation is to dethrone God"; that "a denial of design in Nature
is virtually a denial of God"; and that "no teleologist can be a
Darwinian.
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