In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are Nature's everyday performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives, and in a large proportion of cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow-creatures.... Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations.... A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts or an inundation desolates a district; a trifling chemical change in an edible root starves a million of people.[1] [Footnote 1: Mill: _Three Essays on Religion_ (Holt), pp. 28-30.] The theology which insists on the patent and ubiquitous evidences of God's beneficent purpose, attempts, as already pointed out, to demonstrate that purpose in the history of mankind. Orthodox Christian doctrine, for example, insists that man has been especially created by God, as were the other animals each after their kind, and that man's ultimate and unique destiny is salvation through God's grace. Man was created in perfection in the Garden of Eden, sinned, and will, through God's mercy, find eventual redemption. Following the publication of Darwin's _Origin of Species_, in 1859, the rapid spread of evolutionary doctrine aroused violent opposition on the part of Christian thinkers and devout Christians generally. In the first place it conflicted sharply with the orthodox version of special creation. Secondly, it made more difficult the insistence on marks of design or purpose in Nature. These two points will be clearer after a brief consideration of the nature of Darwinian evolution, with whose thoroughgoing mechanical principles nineteenth-century theology came most bitterly in conflict. The theory explains the origins of species, somewhat as follows: