124 ORGANIC EVOLUTION 



metaphor. The strength of a chain is the strength 

 of its weakest link. You have made a chain of 

 links that are lies and links that are truths, and 

 you have used it to anchor your child's mind to the 

 principles of right living. What happens when the 

 lies lie broken ? The youth throws away Adam, 

 but he also throws away the Sermon on the Mount. 

 He does not wait to discriminate. He accepts the 

 teaching which makes all these things interdependent, 

 the Fall and the law " That ye love one another." 

 He learns that there has been no Fall ; and he 

 is logical enough (since, in the system taught him, 

 truths have been erected upon lies) to assume that if 

 the foundation is false, all is false. The mismade 

 cable with which he has been provided parts at all its 

 worthless links — the sound ones are of no avail — 

 and he loses his moral anchorage. The responsibility 

 for this supreme disaster falls not upon those who 

 made the myths, nor upon those who preserved 

 them, nor upon those who believed them, but upon 

 those who did far worse than the father who gave 

 a stone for bread, in giving, for the truth, lies 

 which they knew to be lies. 



In this and every day the thing that matters is 

 morality. I advocate the teaching of the great facts of 

 biology to our children, and the supersession of the 

 untruths whose nature we now know, chiefly because 

 it is only upon " the solid ground of Nature " that we 

 can base a moral teaching of which it may be said, 

 in the words of the Great Exemplar of morality — 



" And the rain descended, and the floods came, 

 and the winds blew, and beat upon that house, and 

 it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock." 



