182 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tate God's Kingdom, where " the last shall be first and the first last ; " 

 or by " having all things in common," say the Apostles in all the 

 ardour of primitive Christianity, and later on certain religious com- 

 munities ; or by the giving of alms and other charitable acts, says 

 the Christianity of the middle ages ; while socialism maintains that 

 this may be effected by reforms in the laws regulating the division of 

 property. On the other hand, political economy and evolutionary 

 sociology teach us that these miseries are the inevitable and beneficent 

 consequences of natural laws ; that these laws, being necessary condi- 

 tions of progress, any endeavour to do away with them would be to 

 disturb the order of nature and delay the dawn of better things. By 

 " the weeding out of the sickly and infirm," and the survival of the 

 fittest, the process of amelioration of species in the animal kingdom is 

 accomplished. This law of natural selection should be allowed free 

 and ample scope in human society. " Society is not a manufacture, 

 but a growth." Might is really right, for it is to the general interest 

 that the mighty should triumph and perpetuate the race. Thus argues 

 what is now called Science. 



In a book entitled " The True History of Joshua Davidson," the 

 author places ideal Christianity and contemporary society face to face, 

 and shows very clearly the opposition which exists between the doc- 

 trines of would-be science and those of the Gospel : 



" If the dogmas of political economy are really exact, if the laws of the 

 struggle for life and the survival of the fittest must really be applied to human 

 society, as well as to plants and animals, then let us at once admit that Chris- 

 tianity, which gives assistance to the poor and needy, and which stretches out a 

 hand to the sinner, is a mere folly; and let us at once abandon a belief which 

 influences neither our political institutions nor our social arrangements, and 

 which ought not to influence them. If Christ was right, then our present Chris- 

 tianity is wrong, and if sociology really contains scientific truth, then Jesus of 

 Nazareth spoke and acted in vain, or rather He rebelled against the immutable 

 laws of nature." (Tauchnitz edition, p. 252.) 



Mr. William Graham, in his " Creed of Science " (p. 278), writes as 

 follows : 



" This great and far-reaching controversy, the most important in the history 

 of our species, which is probably as old as human society itself, and certainly 

 as old as the ' Republic ' of Plato, in which it is discussed, or as Christianity, 

 which began with a communistic form of society, had yet only within the past 

 half century come to be felt as a controversy involving real and living issues 

 of a momentous character, and not Utopias only remotely bordering upon the 

 possible." 



I think it may be proved that this so-called "doctrine of science" 

 is contrary to facts, and is, consequently, not scientific ; whereas the 

 creed of Christianity is in keeping with both present facts and ideal 

 humanity. 



Darwin borrowed his idea of the struggle for existence and the 



