However, we find a curious confession a few paragraphs before the theistic conclusion of the book. It runs: “Light will be thrown on the origin and history of humanity.” Light, that is to say, from the theory of the transformation of species by natural selection. The words contained the promise of a new twilight of the gods. In the innocent days, when the Creator stood in person behind each species of animal and plant, Linné had seen no great innovation in his defining man as a definite species, the highest species of mammal. God had created the polar bear and the hippopotamus, _Genesis_ said, as well as man. That man had transgressed the command in Paradise, fallen into sin, needed salvation, and so on, was another matter altogether. With Darwin the innovation was incalculably important. On his theory the various species of animals had been developed from each other, without a new creative act. If man was an animal species in this sense, he also must have originated from other animals; and that would be bitter. The phrase shows that Darwin already saw clearly, and had abandoned his belief in a special creation of man. But this point was bound to make more bad blood than all the rest put together. God, now restricted to the direct production of the first living things, had lost man as well as the animals. Moreover, whatever interpretation was put upon the Mosaic narrative, the very source of theistic belief, the Bible, was called into question. How had we come to know of this story of divine creations? By the Bible, the vehicle of revelation. But this Bible was the work of man, and man was now well within the bounds of nature, from which God had been excluded. How could he learn anything from revelation? The biblical writers had clearly only made conjectures. Some of them—with regard to Adam, for instance—were certainly incorrect. There was nothing in the Bible about evolution by means of selection. Indeed, was not the whole picture of a creating Deity an error? These thoughts were bound to press upon the religious mind with all their logical force. When they did so, the very foundations of theology became insecure, to a far more serious extent than Darwin’s moderate conclusion suggested. When the book fell on this contentious ground, it was bound, even if it were only read in the last two pages, to provoke vast waves of hostility against its heretical zoology and botany, especially in England. * * * * *