experiencing evolution 215questioned the Mosaic authorship of the first five books of the Bible. “So violent
has been the shock,” Wright candidly reported, “that out of self-respect I have
found it necessary to turn a little aside from my main studies to examine anew
the foundations of my faith.” Wright emerged from this soul-searching con-
vinced more firmly than ever in the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and
in a supernatural view of history.^33
In the wake of this episode, Wright turned sharply rightward. He repudi-
ated his earlier belief that Genesis was merely a protest against polytheism and
embraced Arnold Guyot’s widely held interpretation of the days of Genesis as
cosmic ages. Wright confessed that “in writing upon this subject at previous
times I have dwelt, I now believe, somewhat too exclusively upon the adaptation
of the document to the immediate purpose of counteracting the polytheistic
tendencies of the Israelites and, through them, of the world.” The story of a
six-day creation might not be literally true, but at least it was scientifically
accurate.^34
By this time Wright was also denouncing the evolutionists, such as Herbert
Spencer and John Fiske, who rashly pushed beyond Darwin’s “limited conclu-
sions” to construct a system of cosmic evolution. Wright frequently contrasted
the modest, cautious Darwin, who had allegedly sought to explain only the
origin of species and who had limited his theory of descent to no more than
“all the members of the same great class or kingdom,” with the impetuous—
and often impious—souls who tried to explain the evolution of the entire world
and who described development from “the first jelly speck of protoplasm to
the brain of a Newton or a Gladstone” without any direct reference to the
Creator. This, he declared, was “Darwinism gone to seed in barren soil.”^35
Even as a spokesman for Christian Darwinism in the 1870s and 1880s
Wright had excluded the origin of matter, life, and the human soul from the
rule of natural law; by the late 1890s he was sounding more and more like a
special creationist. In discussing the origin of humans, Wright emphasized
the great gap between “the highest animal and the lowest man,” though he
allowed that a divine miracle might have bridged the gap, thereby joining hu-
mans and animals. The opening years of the twentieth century found him
damning “the antiquated Uniformitarian geology of Lyell and Darwin” and
arguing for “the traditional view that man originated, through supernatural
interference, at a comparatively recent time, somewhere in Central Asia.”^36
If Wright’s identity as an evolutionist was in doubt at the turn of the
century, it practically disappeared during the next two decades, when he joined
forces with the leaders of the emerging fundamentalist movement. Writing on
“The Passing of Evolution” forThe Fundamentals, the founding documents of
the movement, Wright stressed the special creation of the earliest forms of
plants, animals, and, most important, humans. Man, he wrote, differed so
greatly from the higher animals, it was “necessary to suppose the he came into
existence as the Bible represents,by the special creation of a single pair, from