358 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



immortality an anodyne for mental weaklings. Strong- 

 minded truth-seekers are advised to abandon these irrational 

 beliefs, and to adopt the ''New Religion/' which dispenses 

 once for all with God and the hereafter. "The new religion," 

 says Charles Eliot, ex-President of Harvard, ''will not attempt 

 to reconcile people to present ills by the promise of future com- 

 pensation. I believe that the advent of just freedom has been 

 delayed for centuries by such promises. Prevention will be 

 the watchword of the new religion, and a skillful surgeon will 

 be one of its ministers. It cannot supply consolation as offered 

 by old religions, but it will reduce the need of consolation." 

 ("The New Religion.") 



Again, it may be objected that evolutionists, for all their 

 agnosticism and materialism, frequently put Christians to 

 shame by their irreproachably upright and moral lives. That 

 they sometimes succeed in doing this cannot be gainsaid. 

 But they do so because they borrow their moral standards 

 from Christianity, and do not follow the logical consequences 

 of their own principles. Their morality, therefore, is parasitic, 

 as Balfour has wisely observed, and it will soon die out when 

 the social environment shall have been sufficiently de-Chris- 

 tianized. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die," 

 is their proper philosophy of life, only they have not the 

 courage of their convictions. For the rest, their philosophical 

 convictions have nothing in common with the moral standards 

 which they actually observe. In fact, not only does the 

 monism of evolutionary science fail to motivate the Christian 

 code of morals, but it is radically and irreconcilably opposed 

 to all that Christianity stands for. Hartmann, a modem 

 philosopher, notes with grim satisfaction the clash of the two 

 viewpoints, and predicts (with what, perhaps, is premature 

 assurance) the ultimate triumph of "modem progress." 

 "Many there are," he tells us, "who speak and write of the 

 struggle of civilization, but few there are who realize that 

 this struggle is the last desperate stand of the Christian ideal 

 before its final disappearance from the world, and that modem 



