Faith 259 



spring, is much more than the merely animal affection or 

 attraction of affinities. It is for each a conscientious act of 

 faith, if the highest degree of happiness is to be attained. 

 For evidently the absence of faith and the presence of dis- 

 trust not only lessen the happiness of these individuals, but 

 they lower the strength of the alliance as a means of regen- 

 erating their heredity, and so neglect the remoter and more 

 moral purpose, and degrade the process of procreation from 

 its human possibilities in evolution of virtue, to a lower 

 plane where passion and animal qualities dominate. It 

 follows that faith, meaning that form of it which gives one 

 person confident happiness, by a leaning upon the loyal sup- 

 port or alliance of another, is a quality cultivated and evolved 

 by the sexual alliance. If there be any advantage in it, there 

 should be, according to the laws of evolution, a visible sur- 

 vival favoring those who practice it. And such is undoubt- 

 edly the case. Although the perpetuation of a race may be 

 possible without it, and although reproduction is to some 

 extent so effected, yet the added qualification arising in the 

 aptitude for this virtue, and for its supplement, which is 

 trustworthiness, are sufficient, in the selection by nature, to 

 give an ascendancy to the races of men thus favored. 



But the aptitude for faith is not fundamentally a sexual 

 virtue. Although thus kept alive and transmitted to off- 

 spring it is cultivated in all the relations of life and becomes 

 in secondary form a facility for education, and thereby a 

 means of participation in the benefits of such wisdom as is 

 not logically understood. 



And the aptitude for faith is not to be considered as be- 

 longing especially to one sex as a complement of trust- 



