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In Re EVOLUTION

BY

CHARLES F. DEEMS, LL.D.

PASTOR OF THE CHURCH OF THE STRANGERS, NEW YORK

NEW YORK

JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY

14 AND 16 VESEY STREET

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PREFACE.

PORTIONS of this tractate originally ap peared in the Homiletic Monthly for September, 1884, some time after much of it had been written. In the summer of 1885 certain portions were delivered in a lecture at Chautauqua.

In the examination of the hypothesis of evolution, the author has endeavored to avoid all dogmatism and all special pleading. His aim has been to ascertain for himself just what is the posture of the hypothesis at this time, without much regard to how it stood in the past, or any regard to its possible future, or any care for the effect which the result of his honest study might

have on any scientific, philosophical, or theological opinion previously held by him.

In that spirit it is given to the reader, with the simple reminder that it was not written for scholars, but for the people who have no time for scientific and philosophical studies. The feeling that he was writing ad populum has made him more scrupulously careful in his employment of expressions and use of statements, in which, if errors occur, scholars can more readily supply the correction than can those readers who must take what they know in these departments on authority.

CHURCH OF THE STRANGERS,

NEW YORK, December 4, 1885.

C. F. D.

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