But now that I have prevailed with your correspondent to give up ‘denouncing’ Darwinism, I wish further to press upon him the advantage of ceasing to ‘deny’ it, and, above all, of ceasing to deny it with any admixture of religious phraseology in his denial. He has himself allowed that sciences, seemingly most at variance with the language of Scripture, have come to be reconciled with it; he must see, therefore, that the appearances of Scriptural language can be no objection to Darwinism or to any other scientific theory whatever. Darwinism is founded on the comparison of an enormous number of well-ascertained facts issuing in a few generalizations of extreme importance if true, but also of considerable importance, even if far short of the truth. Every hypothesis which will explain a large number of hitherto disconnected facts, though it may be in itself erroneous, helps and guides men in the end towards the true explanation. To ‘deny,’ or, in other words, to make a public protest against such hypotheses without having anything better or equal, or a tenth part as good to offer in their stead, is to be a hinderer of science, and, instead of being really pious and reverent, is a very pretty, though doubtless unconscious imitation of that rhetoric which, because of the acknowledged difficulties in every form of religion, ‘denies’ religion altogether. That your correspondent _does_ lay just a little tiny claim to infallibility is clear from the very letter in which he modestly disowns it: for he therein prays always to be enabled to think and act about the interpretation of Scripture as he now thinks and acts, which would be a foolish prayer, if his present thoughts and actions might possibly be wrong or misguided. And yet he differs from a very large number of divines, in supposing that the prophets, for instance, knew all that their own prophecies portended; so that if all those worthy divines be right in assuming that the inspired writers did not always ‘know what they wrote about,’ then your correspondent, who makes the contrary supposition, must be wrong,--and there will still be some hope for Darwinism.