The teaching of Owen completed my conversion to the theory of evolution as a general law, not on grounds of physical science, the demonstration by which is and must remain forever incomplete, but on the philosophical ground, which I was more capable of measuring; and with the acceptance of evolution disappeared, logically and, in the subsequent years, completely, the influence of the old anthropomorphic religion, with its terrible dogmas of the inheritance of Adam's transgression and an angry God with His vicarious punishment of His only son, with all the puzzles of miraculous intervention and the perplexities of an infallible revealed word which continually contradicts itself. The conception of Deity thus liberated from the fetters of a materialistic faith rose to a dignity I had never before comprehended, and brought me the new perception of a spiritual religion and life, which was more consoling and vivifying by far than the old belief. It is possible that the impressions of that time have been modified by my subsequent intercourse with scientific men in England; but they are that the very wide and rapid acceptance of the theory of evolution by natural selection was largely due to the relief it offered from the incubus of the old theological conception of the Deity as a personal agency, always interfering with the course of events,--an infinite, omnipotent, and omniscient stage manager,--a conception under which the Christian world at large lay when Darwin announced his solution of the problem. The religious world had been, up to that time, chained to the anthropomorphic conception of Deity, and it was even less due to the purely scientific faculty than to the philosophic that Darwin came as a liberator from a depressing superstition,--the belief in the terrible Hebrew God, ingrained in the conscience of every reverently educated boy, and become in his growth inseparable from the maturer beliefs. The evolution of the human mind itself had finally reached the point at which this anthropomorphism became a thing impossible to maintain reasonably any longer, and the magic word was spoken by Darwin which broke the spell and set us free--who wished to be free--from a mental servitude grown dangerously dear to our deepest faculties, those of reverence and devotion. That evolution took hold slowly with some who finally adopted it was owing to the fact that, with them, that servitude had never been slavish, but always held less sway than pure reason. And contemporaneously with this evolution of the human mind had come the liberation from religious persecution, either inquisitorial, legal, or social; and, perhaps for the first time in the history of the religious dogma, a man might openly dispute the fundamental ideas of a dominant religion and suffer no penalty for his skepticism. CHAPTER XVII SWITZERLAND