EDITOR'S TABLE. 



621 



SEELYE ON CIVILIZATION AND RELI- 

 GION. 



TnE inaugural address of Prof. J. 

 H. Seelye, upon assuming the presi- 

 dency of Amherst College, has at- 

 tracted the marked attention that was 

 to have been expected from the eminent 

 scholarship and versatile accomplish- 

 ments of the author. The interest, 

 moreover, has been especially height- 

 ened by the intrepidity evinced in his 

 choice of a subject. President Seelye 

 did not shrink from the responsibilities 

 of the occasion. Taking the helm of a 

 leading orthodox institution for the 

 education of young men, founded "we 

 are told " as a breakwater to Harvard, 

 which had been captured by Unitarian- 

 ism," and, therefore, as a bulwark of 

 evangelical faith, he addressed himself 

 to one of the great vital issues which 

 have been forced upon modern theology 

 and made prominent by the later ad- 

 vances of scientific thought. His sub- 

 ject is the relations of religion to civ- 

 ilization and to education. 



President Seelye's argument has 

 been interpreted as an assault upon the 

 doctrine of evolution, and by his ad- 

 mirers as an annihilation of it. The 

 Christian Intelligencer, for example, 

 says, " It has fallen like a bomb into the 

 camps of skepticism ; " and has a star- 

 tling significance " in this day of theo- 

 logical enervation and cowardice before 

 a dogmatic evolutionism." Again, the 

 writer says : " He first of all joins issue 

 with the superficial and unsupported 

 notion that there is ' an inherent law 

 of progress in human nature by which 

 it is constantly seeking and gaining for 

 itself an improved condition,' and eon- 

 tends, on the contrary, that there is a 

 'law of deterioration.' Most acutely 

 and eloquently does he prick this bub- 

 ble, blown of sentimentalism and con- 

 ceit, which has so long been suffered to 

 pass unchallenged, and even been has- 

 tily adopted by Christian thinkers." 



Now, with this estimate of the ad- 

 dress we can hardly agree. If evolu- 



tionism be a bubble, we doubt if it has 

 been reserved for President Seelye to 

 prick it ; and if the address be a bomb- 

 shell, there are grounds for thinking 

 that it is the president's own party that 

 must beware of the explosion. His po- 

 sitions are : 1. That the historic phe- 

 nomena of national decay disprove the 

 doctrine of evolution ; 2. That what- 

 ever progress there has been is due to 

 the supernatural. He says : 



" No historical fact is clearer than that 

 human progress has never revealed any 

 inherent power of self-perpetuation. Arts, 

 languages, literature, sciences, civilizations, 

 religions, have in unnumbered instances de- 

 teriorated and left a people to grope in the 

 shadow of death whose progenitors seem to 

 rejoice in the light of life." 



Again : 



" It was not the construction of his house 

 that taught man to build his temple, but 

 exactly the other way. The same is true 

 with sculpture, painting, poetry, and music. 

 It was a religious impulse which gave to 

 all these their first inspiration. The oldest 

 monuments we possess of any of these arts 

 are associated with some religious rite or 

 faith. But, more than this, we must also 

 notice the undoubted fact that the arts have 

 grown in glory just as the religious senti- 

 ment has grown in power." 



In brief 



" The supernatural is the Alpha as well 

 as the Omega of human thought." 



These are favorite ideas with Presi- 

 dent Seelye, which he has expounded 

 elsewhere, and we shall perhaps get his 

 view more sharply before us by quoting 

 briefly from an earlier statement, also 

 made with deliberate care. In the arti- 

 cle on "Darwinism," in "Johnson's 

 New Universal Cycloptedia," he says : 



" The history of men is full of instances 

 of deterioration. If we weigh it simply by 

 number, whether of years, or of nations, or 

 of individuals, degeneration and decay vast- 

 ly preponderate. Where is the civilization 

 now of Tyre, and Carthage, and Babylon, 

 and Nineveh ? and where are the arts which 

 built the Great Pyramid and Baalbec ? All 

 over the world we have evidence of a ten- 

 dency among nations and men to sink away 

 from civilization into barbarism, but history 



