THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 171 



place, and so not only produced monogamy, but enabled it to 

 exist. For monogamy, like autocracy, can only thrive in a 

 country having a privileged aristocracy that strongly enforces 

 the laws of descent and honour to success. Until the 

 laws of descent made laws of monogamy the laws of the 

 land, polygamy was and is the only other means of advance- 

 ment by which the law of the survival of the fittest could 

 be maintained or made possible, for the fittest man gets the 

 largest number of wives under polygamy, and increases the 

 proportion of the fit over the unfit. As I have pointed out 

 elsewhere in this treatise, the virtue of one age of evolution 

 becomes the crime of another, and vice versa. 



So polygamy was a virtue in its day. I will even 

 go so far as to say that if in the future we break 

 away from the laws of descent and customs of veneration 

 to superiority and honour to success, and try to equalize 

 or abolish social distinctions and sacrifice freedom by granting 

 unrestricted liberty in place of freedom, evolution must 

 either degenerate or you must return to polygamy, one or the 

 other, or the nation must cease to advance. Now at the pre- 

 sent day the ordinary man will disagree with me on both 

 these scores, but that will not alter the truth of the state- 

 ments in the least. Now I have mentioned this question, I 

 must point out to the reader that even Christ was most careful 

 not to in any way condemn polygamy, but even goes a long 

 way to support it. Yet that does not, and cannot justify the 

 degenerate and degraded state to which the Hebrews, Canaan- 

 ites and Israelites had reduced polygamy, for even granting 

 that under wise restrictions polygamy might not be a 

 sin, nothing in the world can justify the degraded state to 

 which the Hebrew and Canaanite religions had descended when 

 they tried to justify the utmost uncontrolled and unbounded 

 forms of polygamy, and even made the sacrifice of newly-born 

 babes an act of virtue and religion in their worship of Baal 

 and Astarte. 



To such soil as this God now transplants the choicest" 

 of all his revelations. At first sight such an act makes us 

 almost inclined to doubt divine wisdom, but when we stop 

 to consider why he did so, we no longer doubt. In Assyria, 

 Egypt, Greece and Rome this, the choicest dogma of God and 

 His Trinitv, was sacrificed in all these more civilised countries 



