Charles Darwin was perhaps the greatest man of the three, for after long
years of patient hard work, bravely carried on through bad health, he
produced as the result of his experiments a wonderful book called "The
Origin of Species," in which he explained how the world, instead of
being created all at once as it is to-day, has grown slowly and very
gradually, through many processes, just as we ourselves, our minds, and
all our powers have developed from a state of savagery into our present
state of civilisation. When first Darwin published his work explaining
all this, some people were frightened and horrified, and declared that
he wanted to upset all the old ideas about God and religion. But thus
they had said whenever a new discovery had been made, and yet with each
new discovery we have only learnt more and more how great God is, and
how—
"He moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform."
So all such great discoverers as Newton, Herschel, and Darwin give us in
reality the same message, which is never to be afraid of truth, for
truth comes from God, and the only danger is when we doubt, even for a
moment, that it must come triumphant out of every honest discussion.
*CHAPTER XIX*
*PITT AND THE STATESMEN’S CORNER*
When William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, was buried in the north transept at
Westminster Abbey in the year 1778, Parliament having decreed that "he
ought to be brought near to the dust of kings," and not lie in St.
Paul’s Cathedral, earnestly though the City of London begged for this
favour, he drew to that part of the Abbey so many distinguished
ministers of the Crown, that it soon received the name of the
Statesmen’s Corner, in distinction to the Poets’ Corner which Chaucer
had created. Pitt the elder and Pitt the younger, Fox, Canning,
Palmerston, Castlereagh, Grattan, and Gladstone—these are the names
which most closely belong to the Statesmen’s Corner, and through their
lives we can catch glimpses of English political life from the reign of
George II. down to our own day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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