150 MODERN IDEAS OF EVOLUTION 



in lowering both to a cold, mechanical, and unsym 

 pathetic view of man and nature. This is especially 

 serious when we remember how earnestly, in an 

 address before the Association of German Natural 

 ists, he advocated the teaching of the methods and 

 results of this book as those which, in the present 

 state of knowledge, should supersede the Bible in our 

 schools. We may well say, with his great opponent 

 on that occasion, that if such doctrines should be 

 proved to be true, the teaching of them might become 

 a necessity, but one that would bring us face to face 

 with the darkest and most dangerous moral problem 

 that has ever beset humanity ; and that so long as 

 they remain unproved it is unwise as well as criminal 

 to propagate them among the mass of men as con 

 clusions demonstrated by science. 



