Renan in France, Haeckel in Germany, and Grant Allen in England agreed that religion was doomed.[51] Religious beliefs, according to the last named, were destined "to be entirely discredited as grotesque, fungoid growths which had clustered around the thread of primitive ancestor-worship." Renan inferred as one result of Darwinism the gradual dying out of religion; while the fundamental postulates of religion, God, Freedom and Immortality, were, according to Haeckel, all given the _coup de grace_. The life of man, entangled by descent with lower orders of being, seemed divorced from the wisdom and purpose of God, and an all-engulfing mechanism threatened to swallow up the hopes and aspirations of mankind. The situation illustrated the statement of Emerson: "The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and morals of mankind, are all at the mercy of a new generalization." 51: See Benjamin Kidd in article, "Darwinism," in "Hastings' Dictionary of Religion and Ethics," Vol. IV, p. 404. From this extreme position there was an inevitable reaction. Evolution was seen to present a face not so unfavourable to religion. Origin and destiny were two questions; the higher might be evolved from the lower, but not in such a way as to deprive the higher of its proper quality. If nature and man were so closely related, our idea of the worth of nature could be exalted without depriving man of his dignity. "A man's a man for a' that," whether sprung from the dust of the earth, as had been always held, or derived from organic material below him. An orthodox evolutionist developed a new and powerful argument for immortality; if man had gone so far, why not farther? The meaning of the whole evolutionary process, of the long travail of nature, was obviously, if it had a meaning (and why deny this to our intellectual confusion?), the production of man with his endowments, aspirations and hopes. Descent may become ascent, and the meaning of evolution may well be the development of freedom, and immortality but evolution at the end of its journey. A new and grander teleology was discernible in nature, not seen in the details of its products so much as in the great tendencies and lines of its development and the outworking of its laws. Most impressive of all, it was found that devout Christians, like Charles Kingsley, could become evolutionists without losing their faith; and that evolutionists like Romanes (who had spoken, during his eclipse of faith, of the evolutionary theory as a deluge, "uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless destruction"[52]) could become Christians, or regain their faith, without affecting their scientific views. 52: "A Candid Examination of Theism," p. 51.