MODEKNISM. 



225 



dom He ordained, He established and He alone maintains and 

 upholds. It is not difficult to-day to observe how, in such degree 

 as the nations of Europe reject or neglect His authority, they 

 drift, as in insteances like the sanctity of marriage and the purity 

 of the home-life, into a moral system which is different from His 

 and may be opposite to His, and which, if it remains, must stand 

 upon some other basis or principle than His. 



The survival of the fittest as an article of the Darwinian faith 

 is the antithesis to the Christian benediction of the poor, the 

 humble, the suffering, the afflicted. It is not a moral doctrine 

 at all. The late Professor Huxley saw and in his Eomanes lecture 

 owned that it did not, and could not, justify Christian morality. 

 For it means the triumph of the strong, it means the suppression 

 of the weak; it means the worship of the super-man or the 

 super-nation — that worship which has made Germany the 

 curse of the world. Nietzsche in his wildest hours sinned only 

 by applying the Darwinian theory to international life. To-day 

 the civilised nations of the world exhibit a reaction towards 

 Christian morals. The Conference at Washington, and, indeed, 

 the League of Nations, is a rebuke to the theory of the mailed 

 fist. It seems as though by a striking paradox the triumph 

 of Christ's moral law in international life is beginning just when 

 it seems to be failing in social and even in personal life. But 

 be it so or not so, there can be no doubt as to the absolute differ- 

 ence between the law of science and the law of the Gospel ; and 

 the law of morality, as Christians have always understood it, 

 depends not upon science, but upon the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 



The spirit of science then, or of natural science, as it is some- 

 times called, was in the 19th century triumphant. Its incursion 

 into the domain of letters and morals was an unmistakable evi- 

 dence of its triumph. In its new-born pride it set no limit to its 

 authority. The new heaven and the new earth of which men 

 had dreamed, or at least the new earth, would, it was assumed, be 

 created by the inventions of scientific research. Science, looking 

 upon the world as it had been and as it was, conceived the 

 audacious idea of revolutionising all the many activities of human 

 thought. 



It was in this spirit that science attacked the problems of 

 ancient history. Literary criticism began to breathe a scientific 

 air. For science does not merely observe and collate facts ; it 

 often asserts a hypothesis, which is itself a bold effort of imagina- 

 tion ; then it examines whether the facts do or do not agree with 

 the hypothesis, and, if Oiey do agree, it accepts the hypothesis 

 as true. That was the way in which Descartes dealt with his 

 theory of vortices ; Copernicus with his of the revolution of the 

 heavenly bodies; Newton with his of gravitation. There is na 



O 



