THE UNIVERSAL AND ABSOLUTE RELIGION 381 



unfit are in the majority. It is the nine tenths instead of the 

 one tenth that are submerged. It is the glory of the Christian 

 religion that "the Son of Man is come to seek and to save that 

 which was lost." It is idle to talk of mercy in the Bible sense 

 apart from the Bible idea of the redeeming God. Men who shut 

 themselves up to the cold logic of unaided human philosophy 

 cannot entertain mercy for themselves or others. Said the late 

 Cecil Rhodes in his last hours: " So much to be done, and yet. 

 so little accomplished." And can one wonder that so despairing 

 a note was upon his lips when the first and last article of his creed 

 is said to have been this, " I believe in Force Almighty, the ruler 

 of the universe, working scientifically, through natural selection, 

 to bring about the survival of the fittest and the elimination of 

 the unfittest?" 



Such an one in the moral school has not advanced as far as the 

 poor Chinese woman above quoted, w T ho said, " There ought to be 

 a God like that! " With all his colossal power Cecil Rhodes had 

 not yet got into the class of that rare disciple of nature, Helen 

 Keller, who, when Bishop Brooks was giving her the first definitive 

 lesson about God, is said to have remarked, with a face aglow with 

 wonder, "Is that God? I have always known him, but until now 

 I did not know his name." 



The scientific conception of the survival of the fittest can never 

 be accepted as applying to the spiritual relations of man for the 

 reason that it always conceives of man as on the animal level only. 

 On the physical plane it is true that nature brings into being more 

 creatures, as it does animals, than can be educated into permanent 

 well-being. Thus conceived of the individual is of account as the 

 mere natural progenitor of a better race in order to improve 

 the breed and failing to do this mere nature tends to put an 

 end to man as she does to the animalcule. The race of man 

 thus viewed as a kind has no original and everlasting relation to 

 the Infinite One. Says Dr. George A. Gordon: "Such a view of 

 election to life covers only the few finest specimens and repro- 

 bates the overwhelming majority among the lower races to death. 

 This is the new Calvinism that is tempting thinkers. It is the 

 Calvinism of nature, elaborated from the method of the universe 

 with animal life, which, when applied to man, is the translation 

 of the method of the brute world into the human world." Hu- 

 manity is thus " an ideal which a few are born to compass, but 

 which for men in general is a hopeless impossibility." 



Dr. A. H. Bradford, in commenting on the severity of the 

 Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest, is reported lately 

 to have said: " If I were given to choose being left in the hands of 

 the law of the survival of the fittest, and being placed in the hands 



