THE VERDICT: OF HISTORY. 119 
by decay,—religious, moral, intellectual decay. The 
population was all but destroyed by vices and cruelty, 
Their neighbors, the Chibchas, likewise described an arc 
which ended in devil-worship. Similarly, the history of 
the Botokudes is degeneration, vice, atrocities. The 
negro tribes in the north and east of South America re- 
cord no progress, but, on the other hand, sank into abomi- 
nations, slavery, cannibalism. Where, then, is there sup- 
port for the evolutionary theory, with its assumption of an 
upward trend from a brute condition to civilized and cul- 
tured life? Everywhere in primitive South America we 
see before our very eyes the process of decline and decay. 
Also the religious idea became obscured. Some of these 
tribes had an original monotheism. They recognized a 
supreme creator of all things and gave him various names. 
But the spiritual character of their knowledge of God was 
gradually obscured, God was dragged into the sphere of 
sense and lower divinities were associated with Him,—a 
downward development which absolutely contradicts the 
Darwinian hypothesis. From an original, pure, spiritual 
worship to gross idolatry,—that is the religious decay 
which in the world outside the Bible meets us everywhere, 
also among the original races of South America.” 
Thus in the history of human society, we observe, 
unless the divine power of the gospel supplies the sole 
preserving and regenerating element, a universal law of 
decay in human affairs. Innumerable times, and at the’ 
most crucial moments of human history, not the fittest 
but the unfittest survived. Dr. A. L. Graebner said: 
“The principle of the ‘survival of the fittest’ is so far 
from accounting for the phenomena of history, that the 
principle itself is flatly contradicted and utterly exploded 
by a sober investigation of historical facts. That there 
are in nature numerous instances of a survival of the 
unfittest, is not only conceded by our evolutionists, but 
