EDITOR'S TABLE. 



269 



upon religion, as a statue stands upon 

 its pedestal. Morality and religion have 

 grown up together, supernatural beliefs 

 being mixed with ethical ideas as with 

 everything else. Astronomy was mixed 

 up with religion in the astrological pe- 

 riods. Chemistry was mixed up with 

 religion in early times when the al- 

 chemist always began his experiments 

 with prayer. But who would say that 

 astronomy and chemistry were based 

 upon religion ? In the progressive dif- 

 ferentiations of knowledge they have 

 become freed from superstitions, and 

 are now independent branches of sci- 

 ence. Morals is later in its separation, 

 but it must follow the same law, and 

 become also an independent branch of 

 science. But in these past interactions 

 Professor Smith does not tell us to what 

 extent religious superstitions have cor- 

 rupted morality and hindered its devel- 

 opment ; nor does he intimate to what 

 extent the life of such superstitions may 

 have been prolonged by the conserva- 

 tive influence of their accompanying 

 codes of morals. 



But the Professor comes to closer 

 quarters with his subject when he as- 

 serts that the moral debasement result- 

 ing from change of religious belief is a 

 matter of fact, and already upon us. 

 Religion has succumbed, and its place 

 is taiien by materialism, agnosticism, 

 and evolution. A frightful catalogue of 

 public crimes is made out and charged 

 upon evolution. His curious logic here 

 is, that evolution involves the concep- 

 tion of force, and therefore represents 

 the execrable doctrines of brute force, 

 outrage, and violence in human affairs. 

 He says : " The worship of success sig- 

 nally exemplified in the adoration of a 

 character such as that of Napoleon 

 seems to be the morality of evolution 

 supplanting that of Christianity." The 

 " seeming " is here quite illusive. Evo- 

 lutionists as a class are neither worship- 

 ers of success nor adorers of Napoleon. 

 The parties addicted to these practices 

 will be found in the opposite camp. 



The most signal and representative ex- 

 ample of this adoration that we know 

 was that of a Christian clergyman, the 

 Eev. John S. C. Abbott, who wrote the 

 life of Bonaparte in a strain of extrav- 

 agant eulogy, and found hundreds of 

 thousands of Christian readers who 

 shared the admiration of the reverend 

 author for his hero. It was not in the 

 school of evolution that Abbott and his 

 multitudinous readers were trained to 

 the worship of brutal military success. 



Mr. Smith cites the barbaric policy 

 of England in the treatment of inferior 

 races, the Zulu and Afghan wars, and 

 the English sympathy with the slave 

 power during the American civil war, 

 as further illustrations of that ascen- 

 dancy of brutality which he considers 

 due to the present prevalence of evo- 

 lutionary doctrine. The proposition is 

 preposterous. The Avorship of success 

 and the practice of national atrocities 

 upon inferior races are not things of 

 yesterday. They belong to the historic 

 policy of Christian peoples. Afghan 

 and Zulu wars are not novelties in Eng- 

 lish experience. Many in England may 

 have sympathized with the slavehold- 

 ers in our war, but what of the his- 

 tory of the slave system itself in rela- 

 tion to religion and morality? Were 

 the negroes stolen and enslaved by evo- 

 lutionists or Christians? Did religion 

 abolish or nourish that stupendous im- 

 morality during the two centuries of its 

 growth ? Did not religion through its 

 organizations lend itself to the perpetua- 

 tion of this " sum of all villainies," which 

 was only at last brought to an end solely 

 by the indiscretion of its partisans, who 

 went a little too far, and thus brought 

 on the horrors of a fratricidal war ? 



And as to war itself, the subversion 

 of aU morality and the very revel of brute 

 force, has it not ever been the pastime 

 of religious nations ? And do regiments 

 ever want for chaplains to bless their 

 brutal and bloody vocation ? 



Professor Smith further illustrates 

 the ascendancy of brute-force ideas in 



