Asa was Fiske's mentor and fellow professor. To think they didn't constantly share viewpoints is aburd, and the blurb above kind of puts a hole in your attempt to dismiss Fiske and the notion that Darwin didn't hold a Christian viewpoint. Yet, you brought up Gray while trying to deny Fiske. Got it straight now?
Doing a bit of research now, I'm finding that you don't even seem to know a lot about Fiske, let alone Gray. This is wrong on both counts.
First, Gray was a fairly orthodox Congregationalist. Although Fiske shared the same denominational background, he rejected orthodox Christianity. He became somewhat more sympathetic to Protestantism (in a very general way) later in life, but in college he styled himself as an "infidel" (although he meant non-Christian rather than atheist). It's unlikely that Gray would have taken an "infidel" under his wing, unless he tolerated this in a serious student of science (which Fiske was not, he studied law).
Second, Fiske was never a "professor" at Harvard. He held various temporary positions there, as a lecturer, and as a librarian, but he was never a "professor". Specifically, as I have thus far determined the following positions held at Harvard:
1869 -- Lecturer in Philosophy
1870 -- Instructor in History
1872-1879 -- Assistant Librarian
1879-???? -- member, board of overseerers (two six years terms, I think)
To think they didn't constantly share viewpoints is aburd
I repeat, Darwin was sharing AN UNPUBLISHED THEORY with his friend Gray. If Gray had discussed it with others it would have threatened Darwin's scientific priority. Without regard to what you consider "absurd," or the absurd things you seem to think are likely, there's not a single shred of evidence that he ever did. And even if he did, he wouldn't have singled out a scientific dilletante (at best) like Fiske.
This is just bizzare. Why do you insist that something must have happened for which you have no evidence at all? You don't even know that Fiske ever took a class with Gray (I don't know either) but you confidently assert a mentor relationship. This is strange behavior. You speculate, in the complete absence (so far as can be told) of actual knowledge, that something might have been the case, and you thereby infer that it indeed was the case! (Although this is roughly similiar to Spencer's and, as I am finding, Fiske's mode of philosophical reasoning.)
and the blurb above kind of puts a hole in your attempt to dismiss Fiske and the notion that Darwin didn't hold a Christian viewpoint
Come again? How in the world do you get that from, "Gray became the most persistent and effective American protagonist of Darwin's views. Yet at the same time, he believed that religion and Darwin's theory of natural selection could coexist?"
Jeez, not only was Darwin not a Christian (after around 1851 or so) but I've now learned that your precious Fiske wasn't a Christian either (although unlike Darwin he was a convinced theist).
Although I've noted that Gray (and incidently me) was on the same "side" as Fiske -- and contra Darwin -- in terms of the view that God is intimately involved in the details of evolution, that's not to say that they were philosophical allies. In this respect Gray sided with Darwin (and incidently me) in finding little value in the "purely deductive," idealist, expansive philosophical systems of Fiske and Spencer. From Dupree's biography of Gray, pgs 364-65 (typing this in from my copy):
The question of a publisher [for Gray's Darwiniana] had yet to be settled, but when the rumor went around that Gray was to republish [his essays and reviews of Darwin from the Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere] he got an immediate reaction. It did not come from the religious press but from E.L. Youmans, the disciple of Spencer who worked for the Appletons. Gray must have been something of a puzzle to those apostles of evolution in America, Youmans and John Fiske. He was closer to Darwin than they. And each time they went to Europe they heard his priase sung loudly in the Darwin circle itself. Yet Gray's attitude toward them was cool.John Fiske had made a real effort to put Gray on a Darwinian pedestal by contrasting him with the unmerciful portrait he drew of Agassiz. [Agassiz was Harvard's head of zoology and America's most influential opponent of Darwin.] Gray's reaction was anything but warm. The article "seems to me remarkable for the truths which it were better not to say, at least in the tone adopted. It seems to me in rather bad taste, and the writer -- not being a naturalist -- does not know what Mr. A's good work and strong points are." Once Gray spoke of Youmans as "a great admirer and useful friend of Herbert Spencer -- I imagine a dilletante sort of man."
The basis of Gray's coolness to these Spencerians was more than that they were a generation younger than he and publicists rather than scientists. In the great shift of opinion following the publication of the Origin of Species, the followers of Spencer had replaced Agassiz as the American idealists, the allies of transcendentalism, and the believers in nature as the reflection of an immanent diety. Evolution had a central place with them, but the a priori method of reasoning belonged to the tradition of Agassiz rather that to that of Darwin. Gray was against closed systems of philosophy, regardless of the place they gave to evolution. Both Spencer and his followers and the German evolutionists by then on the rise were in Gray's eyes speculative rather than scientific. [FOOTNOTE here: "An indication on the Germans is given where Gray wrote 'Good!' in the margin of the proof sheets of Francis Darwin, ed., Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, II, 186, at the point where T. H. Huxley says that the German biologists 'were evolutionistis, a priori, already and they must have felt the disgust natural to deductive philosophers at being offered an inductive and experimental foundation for a conviction they had reached by a shorter cut.'"] It was in a letter to G. F. Wright in 1875 that Gray paid his last respects to Chauncey Wright by referring to the latters' aricle, "German Darwinism," in the Nation and emphasizing the difference between Darwinism and Spencerism. Later Gray specifically made the same point against John Fiske's Christian cosmic evolutionism when he said that the "wonder is, not at this climax of Christian hope, but as to how it can be legitimately attained from the underlying scientific data." A humble belief in the mysteries of orthodox Christianity seemed to Gray more scientific than a dogmatic adherence to any philosophy old or new.