"THE FOOL HATH SAID" 267 



teenth-century materialism largely to the cant and 

 distorted piety that in so many instances succeeded 

 the solid doctrines and devotional practices of the 

 Church, with its invincible background of reason. 

 The evidences of credibility render Catholicism 

 acceptable to the human intelligence, while i 

 sweet reasonableness disposes of the extrav 

 gances that made religion so repellent to many 

 scientific minds in the Victorian period. Yet if 

 we can point to the apparently good natural lives 

 led by not a few men, who, like Darwin, have 

 eliminated religion from their thoughts, while per- 

 haps they never actively opposed it, we must re- 

 member that they are living upon the capital of 

 religious traditions and customs handed down to 

 them by their ancestors : 



These people are really pagans living in the Christian era, 

 retaining many of the excellent qualities which they owe 

 neither to nature nor to paganism, but to the inheritance, per- 

 haps involuntary and unrecognized, of the influences of Chris- 

 tianity. Many of these people are kind, benevolent, scrupu- 

 lously moral. They have not learned to be such from nature, 

 for nature teaches no such lessons. Nor have they learned 

 them from paganism, for these are not pagan virtues. They 

 are an inheritance from Christianity. Those, therefore, who 

 built arguments as to the needlessness of religion on the 

 foundation that persons without any belief in God do exhibit 

 all the moral virtues, build on sand.' 



Materialistic evolution means of necessity the 

 denial of freedom of the will, for this cannot 

 be attributed to purely physical and chemical proc- 



"Windle, "Science and Morals," pp. 27, 28. 



