62 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



throughout the future of our race. The laws of gravitation and evo- 

 lution may he included by the coming man in wider generalizations, 

 but we can scarcely conceive their being ever regarded as other than 

 immovable and fundamental portions of truth. We are not of those 

 who say that human knowledge is only relative to the individual con- 

 sciousness, and therefore shadowy and invalid. With reverence be it 

 said, we hold that such knowledge as we have of water or iron, to be 

 a part, however infinitesimal, of the divine knowledge of these things. 



The instituted religions have not only given us the theistic idea, 

 but have also laid us under weighty obligations by establishing the 

 only means of formal instruction in morals known to our race. And 

 here let us note the damage caused by the accidental association of a 

 moral code with a cosmogony developed in early stages of knowledge. 

 It is not because Genesis gives an unsatisfactory account of the world's 

 beginning, that the decalogue does not validly register the dictates of 

 human experience, taking form in the brain of a great lawgiver. The 

 Mosaic and all other authoritative codes of conduct, as currently held 

 to-day, are supported by appeals to experience ; then it becomes the 

 mission of competent thinkers to revise these codes in the light of all 

 that men have thought and done to date. It becomes the duty of 

 science to investigate the conditions of happiness, which we must 

 morally fulfill if we want happiness ; no other standard of conduct do 

 we know than this. 



For the essence of religion, the faith that the right will win, and 

 that we should help it to win, we are indebted to Christianity in its 

 rationalized forms, and for that faith we thank it. 



But the churches have done more than preach theism and teach 

 morality they have endeavored to imitate their Founder in his care 

 for the desolate and oppressed. Countless kind and tender spirits 

 have found in the noble philanthropies of Christianity scope for their 

 charity and mercy. Here, as elsewhere, we do not propose, in our in- 

 dependence, to disinherit ourselves of anything of value which Chris- 

 tianity can give. The scientific conceptions of duty at which we seek 

 to arrive are to be broadened and deepened by the sympathies which 

 yield the highest satisfactions of man. The necessity for the greater 

 recognition of this element in conduct was never so urgent as now. 

 The masses of mankind born into a world abounding with pain and 

 evil have hitherto been disposed to consider their burdens as all 

 equally providential. They are, however, now beginning to distin- 

 guish among the ills which beset them. Some they regard as inevi- 

 table, to be borne with manly courage ; others, again, as infractions of 

 justice, preventable or remediable by proper means. There is no prev- 

 alent recoil from the disciplines of home and business life, but there is 

 wide-spread and growing discontent at the extreme inequalities of for- 

 tune inequalities held to be the result of bad laws, unwise customs, 

 and downright dishonesty. The enormous sale of Mr. Henry George's 



