That is the direction of the revolution to which the publication of Man's Place in Nature gave impetus; and it is in the all-round application of the theory of man's descent that Huxley stands foremost, both as leader and lawgiver. Mr. Spencer has never shrunk from controversy, but he has not forsaken the study for the arena, and hence his influence, great and abiding as it is, has been less direct and personal than that of his comrade, "ever a fighter," who, in Browning's words, "marched breast forward." Man's Place in Nature was the first of a series of deliverances upon the most serious questions that can occupy the mind; and its successors, the brilliant monograph on Hume, published in 1879, and the Romanes Lecture on Evolution and Ethics, delivered at Oxford, 18th of May, 1893, are but expansions of the thesis laid down in that wonderful little volume; wonderful in the prevision which fills it, and in the justification which it has received from all subsequent research, notably in psychology. If the propositions therein maintained are unshaken, then there is no possible reconciliation between Evolution and Theology, and all the smooth sayings in attempted harmonies between the two, of which Professor Drummond's Ascent of Man is a type, and in speeches at Church Congresses of which that delivered by Archdeacon Wilson (see p. 161) is a type, do but hypnotize the "light half-believers of our casual creeds." To some there are "signs of the times" which point to approaching acquiescence in the sentiment of Ovid, paralleled by a famous passage in Gibbon, that "the existence of the gods is a matter of public policy, and we must believe it accordingly." It looks like the prelude to surrender of what is the cardinal dogma of Christianity when we read in the Archdeacon's address that "the theory of Evolution is indeed fatal to certain _quasi_-mythological doctrines of the Atonement which once prevailed, but it is in harmony with its spirit." For those doctrines, as the Venerable apologist may learn from the evidence in Frazer's Golden Bough (chap. iii, _passim_), are wholly mythological, because barbaric. But, in truth, there is not a dogma of Christendom, not a foundation on which the dogma rests, that Evolution does not traverse. The Church of England adopts "as thoroughly to be received and believed," the three ancient creeds, known as the Apostles', the Athanasian, and the Nicene. There is not a sentence in any one of these which finds confirmation; and only a sentence or two that find neither confirmation nor contradiction, in Evolution.