History of Religious Evolution 745 



in the name of Christ they have done it. But evolving man- 

 kind is sick of it, and is dehberately shaking off the filthy gar- 

 ments that degraded religious conceptions and systems have 

 tried to clothe true religion with; while with deepest earnest- 

 ness it is seeking to have Christ's and Paul's true doctrines 

 accepted, expanded, and above all practised. 



It is a matter for regret, however, that in those eminently 

 practical and suggestive volumes by Draper and by \Miite, 

 on the conflict between religion and science, both authors 

 have dealt almost wholly with the religious conflict as waged 

 by those degraded or bigoted types of spurious religionist 

 whom we have designated (p. 699) the religio-deceptive, the 

 religio-selfish, and the religio-dishonest. They have largely 

 failed to perceive that while false religionists of the above type 

 were oppressing humanity, and fettering human thought and 

 aspiration, other and noble lives, imbued with deeply religious 

 sentiments, were constantly in the van of progress and dis- 

 covery. 



For it is unquestionably to the Chrysostoms, the Husses, 

 the Savonarolas, the Ridleys, the Galileos, the Luthers, the 

 Calvins — spite the treatment of noble Servet — , the Newtons, 

 the Hampdens, and their like successors, all men of earnest 

 religious outlook and proenvironal striving, that humanity 

 today owes a large measure of its freedom of thought and 

 aggressive spirit of inquiry. In recent years the almost im- 

 mediate acceptance and advocacy of the doctrine of organic 

 evolution by Fiske, Tennyson, Kingsley, Romanes, Renan, 

 and Kelvin, all of whom cultivated the religious spirit and 

 attitude, demonstrates that religious aspiration is a funda- 

 mental longing and need for the highest human spirits, in 

 their effort to reach the most satisfying relation between them- 

 selves, their neighbors, the world, the universe, and the great 

 First Cause and Energizer of the universe. 



But equally the constant prostitution of all that is l)est 

 in it by time-servers, by selfish pseudo-religious aspirants to 

 earthly place and power, by priest-craft and like conditions, 

 has to be reckoned with as influences that have often dragged 

 religion in the dust. 



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