EVOLUTION THE MASTER-KEY 



Christianity, so-called, is a modification of Judaism. 

 Right was right because it pleased the Almighty ; 

 wrong was wrong because it was forbidden by the 

 decalogue. The foundation of the system was the 

 arbitrary will of a person ; and the answer to the 

 unsatisfied inquirer was the answer given to the 

 child who asks "Why?" "Because I say so." 

 Bolstered up by a penal system framed on the 

 model of human legislation, this sufficed; or, if 

 it hardly sufficed, in the complete sense of that 

 word, it was better than nothing. But when the 

 advance of humanitarian feeling compelled the- 

 ology, for very shame, to become less brutal 

 when the dogma of eternal punishment came to 

 stink in all decent nostrils, and when the deca- 

 logue was found to be the adoption, by the be- 

 lievers in a mountain-god, of the code of a heathen 

 monarch, it was, indeed, high time that some true 

 foundation for morality should be discovered. And 

 the key to the truth was furnished by evolution. 



Another theory, indeed, made attempt to "fill 

 the vacuum." This was the "intuitional" theory 

 of ethics, according to which a "knowledge of 

 good and evil" is inherent in every human con- 

 sciousness. In every man's breast God has a wit- 

 ness called conscience, whose voice is His voice, 

 and whose intimations are His. 



"Whatever clime be sought or land be trod, 

 The voice of conscience is the voice of God." 1 



1 1 have failed to trace the exact words of Byron, but these 

 are very near them. 



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