FIFTH DAY'S SITTING. 131 



sleep like the Brahma of the Hindoos. Meanwhile, Natural 

 Selection, assisted by Sexual Selection and Evolution, steps 

 in and does the work. We have thus to do, not with the 

 " Omnipotent God," but with the inferior deities discovered 

 by Mr. Darwin, of whose existence he tells us in his book. 

 It is they alone who are to be our fear and our dread. 



Darwin. I have said, my Lord, that we could not check 

 the feelings of sympathy towards the weak and helpless 

 without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. 



Homo. Very true, my Lord, he has said so ; but what are 

 our sympathies, according to him, but merely feelings 

 which have arisen from the process of Natural Selection, 

 and which, if we had been reared as hive-bees, would never 

 have existed in us. And does he not plainly tell us our 

 sympathies are wrongly directed, and tend to the degenera- 

 tion of the race, when bestowed on the objects that most 

 need them ? It had thus been better for our race, on Mr. 

 Darwin's principles, that we had had no such sympathies as 

 Natural Selection has unfortunately given us. 



Darwin. I have also spoken, my Lord, of "the grand 

 idea of God hating sin and loving righteousness." 



Homo. Very true, he has, my Lord ; but then, on his 

 hypothesis, righteousness is not a great, living, necessary 

 reality, based on the nature of God, and therefore un- 

 changeable and enduring as God himself ; but a mere 

 accidental and unstable quality, generated by the social in- 

 stincts of brutes, and which might have been quite different 

 from what it happens to be, and led to widely different, 

 and even opposite lines of conduct, and yet been righteous- 

 ness still. I do not see, for my part, how one can believe 

 in an " Omnipotent God," the " Creator and Ruler of the 

 universe," and in this God as "hating sin and loving 

 righteousness," and yet fail to see that the moral sense and 



