Inasmuch as it must necessarily be of great interest to know the attitude which so great a thinker as Darwin adopted towards Christianity, revelation, and other matters of theology, we give unabridged two letters which were written without a view to publication, and were published after his death without the authorisation of his representatives. Having been widely published, however, it is right that they should be given here. The first of these was sent in 1873 to N. D. Deedes, a Dutch gentleman, who wrote to ask Darwin his opinion on the existence of a God: "It is impossible to answer your question briefly; I am not sure that I could do so even if I wrote at some length. But I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me our chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came and how it arose. Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am, also, induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of the many able men who have fully believed in God; but here, again, I see how poor an argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect, but man can do his duty." The second letter was addressed to Nicholas, Baron Mengden, a German University student, in whom the study of Darwin's books had raised religious doubts. It is dated June 5, 1879. The following is a re-translation of a German translation: "I am very busy, and am an old man in delicate health, and have not time to answer your questions fully, even assuming that they are capable of being answered at all. Science and Christ have nothing to do with each other, except in so far as the habit of scientific investigation makes a man cautious about accepting any proofs. As far as I am concerned, I do not believe that any revelation has ever been made with regard to a future life; every one must draw his own conclusions from vague and contradictory probabilities."