Religion as a Factor in Human Evolution 695 



teacher, has to be cleared of those tawdry garments of un- 

 natural surroimdings that we have called his divinity, his 

 superhuman origin, his infallibility, his miracle-working, his 

 resurrection, his ascension, and his immortality. These are 

 not, and have not been, the cardinal grounds on which his 

 life and teachings have commended themselves to the world. 



If then we carefully and impartially try to estimate what 

 were the fundamental factors in Christ's career which have 

 steadily and ever progressively acted for the improvement 

 or evolution of mankind, we would state the following in order 

 of importance. 



First, his only and fundamental law that became the leading 

 part of his gospel and which was to be preached "to every 

 creature" was "that ye love one another." He did not preach 

 the merely moral principle of respect or forbearance. His 

 clear thought and teachings were that as mankind represented 

 the highest earthly expression of a great universal Power or 

 Godhead, of which somewhat figuratively they were the out- 

 flowing; they should view each other as parts of an energized 

 whole, in truth as mankind, man in the mass. 



It was unquestionably this law and constraining stimulus 

 that energized his followers to endure willingly, even gladly, 

 such hardships on behalf of their faith as Paul catalogued in 

 one of his letters. It has also been the same Power or Force, 

 working throughout the millennia since, that has been slowly 

 but yet steadily binding mankind in ever wider bonds of Christ- 

 ian brotherhood. 



True, many have deridingly described these proenvironers 

 as idealists, religious enthusiasts, unscientific fatalists, and 

 other supposedly unbalanced types of humanity. But man 

 in his purest, highest longings has had to look to and come 

 back to these, even after many excursions into su})posedly 

 "scientific fields." 



Unfortunately Christ's followers have often shown their 

 hereditary tendency to idol or fetish worship by almost un- 

 consciously interweaving his noble command with the wooden 

 Roman cross on which he died, thereby failing to realize that 



