120 THE VERDICT OF HISTORY. 
has been deliberately forged into an argument against 
teleology (divine purpose) and divine providence! And, 
we ask, was it by the survival of the fittest that Julius 
Ceasar, one of the grandest rulers of all ages, should 
succumb under the daggers of Brutus and Cassius; 
that Paul and Seneca should die by authority of their 
inferior, Nero; that Popery, rotten to the core and repre- 
sented by men who would have brought on the ignominous 
collapse or extinction of every other dynasty in the days 
of the Roman pornocracy, should survive, while the il- 
lustrious house of Henry I. sank away to ruin in the 
third and fourth generation; that John Hus should die 
at the stake and Jean Charlier de Gerson in timid mon- 
astic retirement, while Balthasar Cossa, by far their in- 
ferior in talents and learning, and every inch an infamous 
scoundrel, having for a time disgraced even the Roman 
see as John XXIII, ended his days as a Cardinal and 
3ishop of Tusculum and Dean of the Sacred College; 
that Girolamo Savonarola, one of the most remarkable 
and pure-minded leaders of his day and of all times, 
should be fought down and crushed in a struggle with 
men not one of whom was worthy of unloosing his shoe’s 
latchet, among them Alexander VI, one of the most 
scandalous wretches of all history? Survival of the 
fittest !”” 
The article from which we have quoted points out the 
relevancy, to the question at issue, of the principle of 
degeneration and gradual decay in historical organisms 
or institutions. “Our scientists who bother themselves 
and others about the descent of man have favored with 
a keen interest the Bushmen of Australia and other types 
of savage humanity, with receding skulls, flat noses, thin 
legs, little or no clothing, and not much of morals or 
religion. The lower in the scale and the farther remote 
from the civilized Caucasian a newly discovered or in- 
