EVOLUTION THE MASTER-KEY 



part of known truth any time these forty years ; it 

 had been proved when most of the parents of the 

 present generation of school-children were them- 

 selves at school. Yet so far are men from loving 

 truth, so far are they from even mere expediency 

 in this matter, that there is no general desire 

 among parents that their children should be taught 

 this great and significant truth. 



One other proof of my contention that the love 

 of truth is not common property : It is the almost 

 incomprehensible fact that there exist to-day a 

 whole host of parents who do not believe in the 

 historical accuracy of Adam and Eve, and who 

 repudiate the doctrine of eternal torment, the 

 most immeasurably horrible and inhuman of all 

 human conceptions, and yet consciously permit 

 their children to be taught and to believe in the 

 literal truth of that Babylonian legend and of a 

 dogma which conceives of Deity as the devil him- 

 self. 



It is thus only too easily proved that the love 

 of truth, the hatred of falsehood, and the philo- 

 sophic temper which ignores all personal interests 

 are among the rarest of rare possessions. 



In sooth, the philosophic temper is hardly more 

 than an ideal. It is entirely alien to the natural 

 man to love unpalatable truths; and every true 

 belief which runs counter to our beliefs must be 

 unpalatable unless the appetite for truth over- 

 whelm all other desires. Only too few, in the 

 history of thought, are the instances of those who 



