Men of larger mind like Kingsley and Farrar, with English and American broad churchmen generally, took ground directly in Darwin's favour.

Even Whewell took pains to show that there might be such a thing as a Darwinian argument for design in Nature; and the Rev.Samuel Houghton, of the Royal Society, gave interesting suggestions of a divine design in evolution.
Both the great English universities received the new teaching as a leaven: at Oxford, in the very front of the High Church party at Keble College, was elaborated a statement that the evolution doctrine is "an advance in our theological thinking." And Temple, Bishop of London, perhaps the most influential thinker then in the Anglican episcopate, accepted the new revelation in the following words: "It seems something more majestic, more befitting him to whom a thousand years are as one day, thus to impress his will once for all on his creation, and provide for all the countless varieties by this one original impress, than by special acts of creation to be perpetually modifying what he had previously made." In Scotland the Duke of Argyll, head and front of the orthodox party, dissenting in many respects from Darwin's full conclusions, made concessions which badly shook the old position.
Curiously enough, from the Roman Catholic Church, bitter as some of its writers had been, now came argument to prove that the Catholic faith does not prevent any one from holding the Darwinian theory, and especially a declaration from an authority eminent among American Catholics--a declaration which has a very curious sound, but which it would be ungracious to find fault with--that "the doctrine of evolution is no more in opposition to the doctrine of the Catholic Church than is the Copernican theory or that of Galileo." Here and there, indeed, men of science like Dawson, Mivart, and Wigand, in view of theological considerations, sought to make conditions; but the current was too strong, and eminent theologians in every country accepted natural selection as at least a very important part in the mechanism of evolution.
At the death of Darwin it was felt that there was but one place in England where his body should be laid, and that this place was next the grave of Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey.

The noble address of Canon Farrar at his funeral was echoed from many pulpits in Europe and America, and theological opposition as such was ended.

Occasionally appeared, it is true, a survival of the old feeling: the Rev.Dr.Laing referred to the burial of Darwin in Westminster Abbey as "a proof that England is no longer a Christian country," and added that this burial was a desecration--that this honour was given him because he had been "the chief promoter of the mock doctrine of evolution of the species and the ape descent of man." Still another of these belated prophets was, of all men, Thomas Carlyle.
Soured and embittered, in the same spirit which led him to find more heroism in a marauding Viking or in one of Frederick the Great's generals than in Washington, or Lincoln, or Grant, and which caused him to see in the American civil war only the burning out of a foul chimney, he, with the petulance natural to a dyspeptic eunuch, railed at Darwin as an "apostle of dirt worship." The last echoes of these utterances reverberated between Scotland and America.

In the former country, in 1885, the Rev.Dr.Lee issued a volume declaring that, if the Darwinian view be true, "there is no place for God"; that "by no method of interpretation can the language of Holy Scripture be made wide enough to re-echo the orang-outang theory of man's natural history"; that "Darwinism reverses the revelation of God" and "implies utter blasphemy against the divine and human character of our Incarnate Lord"; and he was pleased to call Darwin and his followers "gospellers of the gutter." In one of the intellectual centres of America the editor of a periodical called The Christian urged frantically that "the battle be set in array, and that men find out who is on the Lord's side and who is on the side of the devil and the monkeys." To the honour of the Church of England it should be recorded that a considerable number of her truest men opposed such utterances as these, and that one of them--Farrar, Archdeacon of Westminster--made a protest worthy to be held in perpetual remembrance.