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Primary source: Henry Ward Beecher, Evolution and Religion, 1881.
Caption: Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, one of the most famous Congregational preachers of his day, involved himself in controversy when he accepted Charles Darwin's theories of evolution.
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To the fearful and the timid let me say that while Evolution is certain to oblige theology to reconstruct its system, it will take nothing away from the grounds of true religion. It will strip off Saul's unmanageable armor from David, to give him greater power over the giant. Simple religion is the unfolding of the best nature of man towards God, and man has been hindered and embittered by the outrageous complexity of unbearable systems of theology that have existed. If you can change theology, you will emancipate religion; yet men are continually confounding the two terms, religion and theology. . .
Old men may be charitably permitted to die in peace, but young men and men in their prime are by God's providence laid under the most solemn obligations to thus discern the signs of the times, and to make themselves acquainted with the knowledge which science is laying before them. . .
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Henry Ward Beecher, Evolution and Religion (1881) in The American Spirit: United States History as Seen by Contemporaries, ed. Thomas A. Bailey and David M. Kennedy (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1994): 103–4.
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