No wonder so large a percentage of the boys and girls who go from Sunday schools and churches to colleges (sometimes as high as seventy-five per cent.) never return to religious work.  How can one feel God’s presence in his daily life if Darwin’s reasoning is sound?  This restraining influence, more potent than any external force, is paralyzed when God is put so far away.  How can one believe in prayer if, for millions of years, God has never touched a human life or laid His hand upon the destiny of the human race?  What mockery to petition or implore, if God neither hears nor answers.  Elijah taunted the prophets of Baal when their god failed to answer with fire; “Cry aloud,” he said, “peradventure he sleepeth.”  Darwin mocks the Christians even more cruelly; he tells us that our God has been asleep for millions of years.  Even worse, he does not affirm that Jehovah was ever awake.  Nowhere does he collect for the reader the evidences of a Creative Power and call upon man to worship and obey God.  The great scientist is, if I may borrow a phrase, “too much absorbed in the things infinitely small to consider the things infinitely great.”  Darwinism chills the spiritual nature and quenches the fires of religious enthusiasm.  If the proof in support of Darwinism does not compel acceptance—­and it does not—­why substitute it for an account of the Creation that links man directly with the Creator and holds before him an example to be imitated?  As the eminent theologian, Charles Hodge, says:  “The Scriptural doctrine (of Creation) accounts for the spiritual nature of man, and meets all his spiritual necessities.  It gives him an object of adoration, love and confidence.  It reveals the Being on whom his indestructible sense of responsibility terminates.  The truth of this doctrine, therefore, rests not only upon the authority of the Scriptures but on the very constitution of our nature.”

I have spoken of what would seem to be the natural and logical effect of the Darwin hypothesis on the minds of the young.  This view is confirmed by its actual effect on Darwin himself.  In his “Life and Letters,” he says:  “I am much engaged, an old man, and out of health, and I cannot spare time to answer your questions fully—­nor indeed can they be answered.  Science has nothing to do with Christ, except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence.  For myself, I do not believe that there ever has been any revelation.  As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.”  It will be seen that science, according to Darwin, has nothing to do with Christ (except to discredit revelation which makes Christ’s mission known to men).  Darwin himself does not believe that there has ever been any revelation, which, of course, excludes Christ.  It will be seen also that he has no definite views on the future life—­“every man,” he says, “must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.”