SIXTH day's sitting. 151 



more excellent way. He tells us indeed that " we could 

 not check our sympathy " towards the poor, and weak, and 

 Buffering, " without deterioration in the noblest Dart of ouc 

 nature ;" but what avails such a hint when he puts into the 

 mouths of such as might be disinclined to take it, such a 

 reply as the following to the promptings of any kindly 

 impulses of their nature ? — the exercise of them would 

 be "highly injurious to the race of man." 



If such sentiments were generally adopted — which, 

 happily, we have little reason to fear — in the course of a 

 few generations they would assuredly open the flood-gates 

 of irreligion and immorality in our land, and cause such an 

 ■outburst of selfishness and impiety as would overturn our 

 social institutions from their lowest foundations, and intro- 

 duce a moral disorder and aaarchy which might be long in 

 passing away. Such a change has been brought about in 

 France by the working of a false and irrational religion on 

 the one hand, and by the rash speculations of (so-called) 

 philosophers and men of science on the other ; and what 

 has occurred in France is possible in England. We cannot 

 reasonably expect a people to be better than the God they 

 believe in. To be like the object of their faith and worship 

 is about as high an ambition as can influence them. Let 

 our countrymen, then, learn to believe in the deity which 

 Mr. Darwin introduces to them — let them discard the God 

 and Redeemer of Christianity for the powers which he tells 

 them have founded and built up the rational world — Natural 

 Selection and Sexual Selection — and what could we expect 

 as the result but the upturning of the foundations of both 

 religion and morality ; the destruction of all that is pure, 

 and gentle, and loving, and sympathetic in the relations of 

 life as they at present subsist among us ; and the substitu- 

 tion of force, and passion, and cunning, for benevolence and 



