3o6 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM 



The whole Christian world has thus verified Christ's 

 words, and Rationalists also recognise them as true in 

 spite of their rejecting Him as the Divine Master. 



(4) This author, like Haeckel and Biichner, attributes 

 everything to Natural Selection as having caused it. 

 There is an intense " struggle for existence " between 

 what St. Paul calls " the law in his members " and " the 

 law in his mind," or between the tendency of evil and 

 the aspiration to goodness. That is the sphere of the 

 struggle, and the issue is either debasement or nobility, 

 which may be called the " survival of the fittest," if the 

 latter prevail through the power of the will. 



The primary cause, however, is overlooked ; and that 

 is the consciousness of the struggle, and of the power to 

 determine which of the two " laws " shall win the battle. 

 Therein lies man's moral responsibility. Animals can 

 entertain no such struggle ; they are non-moral. 



(5) In this paragraph he speaks of "holiness," but 

 does not seem to realise that, as Seeley says, it was a 

 word unknown and unsuited to man before Christ came. 

 As in the use of this word, so is it often the case that 

 Rationalists adopt the Christian phraseology, but attribute 

 Christian ethics to natural causes rather than to Jesus 

 Christ, the true source. Though altruism may find its 

 natural source in parental love, and in what Seeley calls 

 a spark of " natural kindliness," it could never have been 

 formed into a flame of enthusiasm by any other means 

 than by a Divine Personality. Plato saw that and Christ 

 proved it to be true. 



The ethics of Jesus supply the clear historical origin 

 of the development of Christian love, or 'AydTrrj. 



It was intensified in the family circle ; as shown by 

 the elevation of the wife to her proper sphere as a help 

 meet for man ; in the realisation of the sacredness of 



