The blow was serious in many ways, and especially so in two--first, as withdrawing all foundation in fact from the scriptural chronology, and secondly, as discrediting the creation theory.

The blow was not unexpected; in various review articles against the Darwinian theory there had been appeals to Lyell, at times almost piteous, "not to flinch from the truths he had formerly proclaimed." But Lyell, like the honest man he was, yielded unreservedly to the mass of new proofs arrayed on the side of evolution against that of creation.
At the same time came Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, giving new and most cogent arguments in favour of evolution by natural selection.
In 1871 was published Darwin's Descent of Man.

Its doctrine had been anticipated by critics of his previous books, but it made, none the less, a great stir; again the opposing army trooped forth, though evidently with much less heart than before.

A few were very violent.
The Dublin University Magazine, after the traditional Hibernian fashion, charged Mr.Darwin with seeking "to displace God by the unerring action of vagary," and with being "resolved to hunt God out of the world." But most notable from the side of the older Church was the elaborate answer to Darwin's book by the eminent French Catholic physician, Dr.
Constantin James.

In his work, On Darwinism, or the Man-Ape, published at Paris in 1877, Dr.James not only refuted Darwin scientifically but poured contempt on his book, calling it "a fairy tale," and insisted that a work "so fantastic and so burlesque" was, doubtless, only a huge joke, like Erasmus's Praise of Folly, or Montesquieu's Persian Letters.
The princes of the Church were delighted.