REV. PREBENDARY WACE, D.D., ON ETHICS AND RELIGION. 139 
mankind, will never depart seriously from the old highways. But 
this movement, if anything, must be according to evolutionary 
doctrines, and what do these tell us? Among others this, that 
the fittest survive. That sounds very plain, and so far Christianity 
does survive and does flourish. But the other side of this is equally 
important. Whatever survives is fittest. A most serious and 
alarming corollary, I maintain. The French are a nation of people 
who are nothing if not intellectual and logical. With them every 
theory is as soon as possible put to the test of practice. The 
result of Darwinian doctrines applied to morals, as in the writings 
of Zola, are so alarming to a nation of clear-headed people, that 
a man like M. Brunetiere, the mouthpiece of the University of 
Paris, can speak of the bankruptcy of science, on account of its 
failure in the sphere of morals. 
Are we alarming ourselves for nothing? I think not. The 
alarming consequences we allude to are with us, and we have but 
to look to the writings on social subjects of an eminent man like 
Professor Karl Pearson, the Huxley of to-day, in another sphere 
of science, in his ethics of free thought as to marriage, and we find 
“a new sex-relationship will replace the old. The Socialistic 
movement with its new morality, and the movement for sex 
equality, must surely and rapidly undermine our current marriage 
customs and marriage laws,’ and much more to this effect. 
It is only too easily conceived and to be apprehended that, if 
the sanctions of religion be removed from the sphere of conduct, if 
the antiseptic of Christianity be operative no longer in civilized 
nations, our children’s children might live to see a reversal of the 
5th, 6th, 7th, 8th and 10th Commandments, such as it makes one shud- 
der to contemplate. If “‘ whatever survives be fittest,” it is thereby 
right to do or forbid now things very different from what were done 
and forbidden of old, and what will be done and forbidden a 
generation or two hence. Morality thus is relative to the times and 
to the nations concerned. It is however through the direct reversal 
of this system of relative ethics that the Christian Gospel with 
its pure morality has spread from pole to pole till a third of the 
human race is under nominal Christian government. The un- 
varying unyielding character of the Christian code in spite of much 
inconsistency of its followers in all ages, has been at once the key- 
note of its success and its glory. 
The moral ideas of Greece and Rome as expounded by Plato, 
