those that enable their possessor to struggle for existence most
efficiently will be preserved. Repeat this process for millions and
millions of years, and, as it is impossible to assign any limit to
variability, it would seem as though the present diversities of
species must certainly have come about sooner or later, and that
other divergences will continue to come about to the end of time.
The great agent in this development of life has been competition.
This has culled species after species, and secured that those alone
should survive which were best fitted for the conditions by which
they found themselves surrounded. Endeavour to take a bird's-eye
view of the whole matter. See battle after battle, first in one part
of the world, then in another, sometimes raging more fiercely and
sometimes less; even as in human affairs war has always existed in
some part of the world from the earliest known periods, and probably
always will exist. While a species is conquering in one part of the
world it is being subdued in another, and while its conquerors are
indulging in their triumph down comes the fiat for their being culled
and drafted out, some to life and some to death, and so forth ad
infinitum.

C. It is very horrid.

F. No more horrid than that you should eat roast mutton or boiled
beef.

C. But it is utterly subversive of Christianity; for if this theory
is true the fall of man is entirely fabulous; and if the fall, then
the redemption, these two being inseparably bound together.

F. My dear friend, there I am not bound to follow you. I believe in