Well, Circumstantial Selection is largely a theory of collisions:  that is, a theory of the innocence of much apparently designed devilry.  In this way Darwin brought intense relief as well as an enlarged knowledge of facts to the humanitarians.  He destroyed the omnipotence of God for them; but he also exonerated God from a hideous charge of cruelty.  Granted that the comfort was shallow, and that deeper reflection was bound to shew that worse than all conceivable devil-deities is a blind, deaf, dumb, heartless, senseless mob of forces that strike as a tree does when it is blown down by the wind, or as the tree itself is struck by lightning.  That did not occur to the humanitarians at the moment:  people do not reflect deeply when they are in the first happiness of escape from an intolerably oppressive situation.  Like Bunyan’s pilgrim they could not see the wicket gate, nor the Slough of Despond, nor the castle of Giant Despair; but they saw the shining light at the end of the path, and so started gaily towards it as Evolutionists.

And they were right; for the problem of evil yields very easily to Creative Evolution.  If the driving power behind Evolution is omnipotent only in the sense that there seems no limit to its final achievement; and if it must meanwhile struggle with matter and circumstance by the method of trial and error, then the world must be full of its unsuccessful experiments.  Christ may meet a tiger, or a High Priest arm-in-arm with a Roman Governor, and be the unfittest to survive under the circumstances.  Mozart may have a genius that prevails against Emperors and Archbishops, and a lung that succumbs to some obscure and noxious property of foul air.  If all our calamities are either accidents or sincerely repented mistakes, there is no malice in the Cruelty of Nature and no Problem of Evil in the Victorian sense at all.  The theology of the women who told us that they became atheists when they sat by the cradles of their children and saw them strangled by the hand of God is succeeded by the theology of Blanco Posnet, with his ’It was early days when He made the croup, I guess.  It was the best He could think of then; but when it turned out wrong on His hands He made you and me to fight the croup for Him.’

HOW ONE TOUCH OF DARWIN MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD KIN

Another humanitarian interest in Darwinism was that Darwin popularized Evolution generally, as well as making his own special contribution to it.  Now the general conception of Evolution provides the humanitarian with a scientific basis, because it establishes the fundamental equality of all living things.  It makes the killing of an animal murder in exactly the same sense as the killing of a man is murder.  It is sometimes necessary to kill men as it is always necessary to kill tigers; but the old theoretic distinction between the two acts has been obliterated by Evolution.  When I was a child and was told that our dog and our