AN OUTLINE OF THE THEORY. 27 
habit, that it is best for him to obey his more persistent 
IMMpPUulsesie ss Morals are relative, not absolute; there 
1s no fixed standard of right and wrong by which the ac- 
tions of all men throughout all time are measured... . . 
That which man calls sin is shown to be more often due 
to his imperfect sense of the true proportion of things, 
and to his lack of imagination, than to his willfulness.”’ 
Clodd adds that if conduct has been made to rest on 
“supposed divine commands(!) as to what man shall and 
shall not do,” that is an assumption which at best serves 
to restrain the “brutal and ignorant.” 
J. B. Warren, a contributor to the Presbyterian, has 
well stated the effects of the evolutionary theory on re- 
ligion and morals: 
“Its legitimate tendency is to degrade mankind from 
that mental and moral dignity that is always recognized 
as belonging to them, and to place them on an essential 
level with the brute creation—even with the lowest forms 
of vegetable and animal existence. According to that the- 
ory, man differs from the lower organisms not in kind 
so much as in the degree of development. Mr. Darwin 
himself was troubled about the value of his own convic- 
tions, on the ground that his mind was evolved from that 
of lower animals. That is to say, he reckoned his own 
mental actions as valueless and untrustworthy, because 
of the essential identity between his mind and that of the 
lowest creatures that live in the mud of our swamps. 
Thus we see the legitimate tendency of this theory to de- 
grade the mental dignity of man. And it also degrades 
the moral nature and faculties of man, and undermines 
the very foundations of moral and religious principle, in 
that it teaches that man is only a better developed brute— 
the natural result being that man is no more under moral 
obligation than the brute, or has no different basis of mor- 
al obligation from the brute, but only a better idea of 
