EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 



is not only we modern men, who call ourselves 

 enlightened, that will agree to this. I doubt 

 not even the narrow-minded bigots of days now 

 happily gone by would have been made to agree 

 to it, if they could have had some doggedly per- 

 sistent Sokrates to cross-question them. Calvin 

 was willing to burn Servetus for doubting the 

 doctrine of the Trinity, but I do not suppose 

 that even Calvin would have argued that the 

 belief in God's threefold nature was more fun- 

 damental than the belief in his existence and 

 his goodness. The philosophical error with him 

 was that he could not dissociate the less impor- 

 tant doctrine from the more important doctrine, 

 and the fate of the latter seemed to him wrapped 

 up with the fate of the former. I cite this 

 merely as a typical example. What men in past 

 times have really valued in their religion has 

 been the universal twofold assertion that there 

 is a God who is pleased by the sight of the just 

 man and is angry with the wicked every day ; 

 and when men have fought with one another, 

 and murdered or calumniated one another for 

 heresy about the Trinity or about eating meat 

 on Friday, it has been because they have sup- 

 posed belief in the non-essential doctrines to be 

 inseparably connected with belief in the essen- 

 tial doctrine. In spite of all this, however, it is 

 true that in the mind of the uncivilized man the 

 great central truths of religion are so densely 

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