The supreme test as to the future is the death of those we love and the thought of our own death. In 1851 Darwin lost a little daughter whom he loved tenderly. His intimate letters at that time have affectionate and pathetic references to her; but there is not one word in them to indicate the slightest hope of ever meeting her again. When he himself was close to the end, mentally clear but with no prospect of recovery, his calm words were: ‘I am not the least afraid of death.’[306] As to the question of God, Darwin’s statements are as elaborate as in regard to immortality, and for the same reason, because eager inquirers were determined to find out where he stood. In early life, while he still believed in the theory of special creations, he accepted the deistic view without hesitation: ‘Many years ago, when I was collecting facts for the “Origin,” my belief in what is called a personal God was as firm as that of Dr. Pusey himself.’[307] As the years went on, the working out of his theories involved a profound change, but still he never at any time admitted an absolute disbelief or a militant atheism. He goes over and over the old, old arguments. How could an omnipotent God, who desired the good of all his creatures, inflict upon the travailing creation such an infinity of misery? Again, there is the puzzle of design and providential interference. He is reluctant to believe that this vast and ordered whole came together by mere chance; yet he debates with Asa Gray the possible providence in the fall of a sparrow: ‘An innocent and good man stands under a tree and is killed by a flash of lightning. Do you believe (and I really should like to hear) that God _designedly_ killed this man? Many or most persons do believe this; I can’t and don’t. If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man and the gnat are in the same predicament.’[308] Nor does the Pantheistic solution appeal much more than the anthropomorphic one. Darwin is constantly personifying Nature, with a capital N; but he is careful to specify that he does this for convenience, and that Nature means only the sum of natural laws in their eternal working, not any mysterious force of Divinity. The Pantheistic solution also creates as many puzzles as it solves. So the conclusion is, to leave all such questions as hopeless and insoluble, beyond the intelligence of man so completely that it does not seem intended that he should grapple with them. And Darwin at least was satisfied to weigh and measure and experiment and let God go.