NATURAL SELECTION in 



it will plunge into bogs, morasses, and quicksands of 

 error. This evil destiny waited upon our naturalist, as it 

 has befallen all who have disowned allegiance to a Divine 

 Power to worship at the shrine of Charles Darwin.*" 



There is a coterie of such men, not in my opinion 

 very noble, who have drawn their inspiration from 

 him whom they consider to be an infallible fountain 

 of truth, and who, regarding all religious beliefs and 

 forms of worship as a personal offence to the memory 

 of their great master, have banded themselves together 

 to grapple with superstition and all its noxious brood. 



Their mission is, by the dissemination of suitable 

 publications, to emancipate the human mind from 

 beliefs which they consider to be degrading to it : 

 such as, that there is a God to whom the universe 

 owes its material laws, and to whose established moral 

 order man is spiritually subject ; that man is in some 

 degree better than a beast ; that there is a hope for 

 him beyond the grave ; that conscience and the 

 concepts of duty, truth, and righteousness testify of 

 his spiritual nature being derived from, and re- 

 sponsible to, a Divine Lawgiver. Conscience, Duty, 

 Truth, Eighteousness. The more respectable Dar- 

 winians acknowledge that Nature has wrought the 

 sense of these things into the being of man, to the end 

 that they should induce him to subordinate his purely 

 selfish interests to the interests of society. His 

 altruistic actions are thus furnished with what they 

 term a supra-rational sanction, or a sanction divorced 

 from reason and reality. 



