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Evolution and Religion 


A PARENT’S TALKS WITH HIS 
CHILDREN CONCERNING THE 
MORAL SIDE OF EVOLUTION 


BY 
WILLIAM TRUMBULL, LL.B. 


“ Knowledge breeds conceit, while love builds up character.” 
— Pav, Twentieth Century New Testament. 


THE GRAFTON PRESS 
NEW YORK MCMVII 


but 


Mh ID ene 


Dedication 
TO MY CHILDREN, 


AND TO ALL THOSE, THE TRUE GENTLEFOLK OF 
OUR RACE, WHO GO TO MAKE UP THE DIVINE 
BROTHERHOOD OF THE CHILD-SPIRIT 
IN THIS WORLD OF MARVELS, THE 
FOLLOWING STUDY OF EV- 
OLUTIONARY IDEALS 
IS LOVINGLY INSCRIBED 


CONTENTS 


A BEGINNING 

Licutr AND Heat 

Lire 

Man 

INTELLIGENCE : 

APPARENT Hiurinenns : 

PROLONGED INFANCY . 

Race ror Lirr 

Man’s TrrumpeH 

DISEASE . 

Oruer ENEMIES. 

Man Aaarnst Man 

Facr Versus THrory 

\ Srruaeie ror Existence 

ALTRUISM z 

Man ts CompLex 

Emotion ae, 

Man’s Mois. nomened Wiens 

SELFISHNESS ; 

Weratru or NATIONS 

Mora SENTIMENTS 

Lire’s ConDITIONS A 
‘ALLED LOWER Atguian 


OGRESS LZ aa 
'HE Ipra or Gop ane ® 
ERSTITION . . . =. « 
Race SurvIVAL ay © aot Bea 
PIGRAT ADUAS = a. as ce es 
SACRIFICE . . bah as 
Varyine Moran maw ad gh 


E GENERAL GooD .. . 
URVIVAL OF THE Firrest K 


yy 
> 
a 
i>) 


ove Rr Oa Pr FP wOH HOH 


a 


HuMANITY 
A DitemmMa 

\ RELIGION 
SELF-SACRIFICE . 
Human Be iers é 

o Views OF RELIGION 

Feticuism 
SYMBOL-WORSHIP 

\ Tue Great RELiGions 
Tur GENERAL WELFARE 
BuppHIsM 
ATHEISM i 
UNIVERSAL SYMPATHY 
CoMMANDMENTS 
EssENTIAL VIRTUES 
PEACEABLENESS 
AnmMAL WorsHIP 
INFLUENCE ON JUDAISM 


INFLUENCE ON CHRISTIANITY 


CoMMANDMENTS 
INSCRIPTIONS 

ORIENTA! Sie Storie) 
ConFuctius 
CoMMANDMENTS 
CONTRADICTIONS . . 
GOVERNMENT .. . 
Mora Tracuine 
ZOROASTER 

Sun Worsuie 
Morauity 

PARSEES 

GREECE . *. |. 4 
Rome 

SCANDINAVIA 
MoHAMMEDANISM 
JUDAISM . 


CoNnTENTS 


PAGE 


Brartne on Man’s SurnvivaL .°. . . . +. se ss 4 


CoNTENTS 


Ossection: Wuy Race? 
Law or Mortariry 
PATRIOTISM : 
So-cALLED Racrs 

One Race 

Race Love r 
Love Wiruout REASON 
Tur Gotpen Mran 

Law . 

VIOLENCE . 

SELECTION ie ces 
INTELLECTUAL KNOWLEDGE 
CHRISTIANITY 

Tue GospeEL ... 
Tue Minp oF Cuarist . 


EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


A BEGINNING 


“In the beginning God created the heaven and the 
earth. And the earth was waste and void, and darkness 
was upon the face of the deep.” — Beyond this simple 
statement of creative fact, human knowledge with all 
its progress does not go. Man’s best thought seems to 
admit that there was a beginning, a creation. No 
matter how many countless ages back he may push the 
date, man still appears to believe that the universe, as 
he knows it, has not existed from all eternity and will 
not exist to all eternity. But a beginning postulates a 
cause, a creation postulates a creator. Had the uni- 
verse existed unchanged and in its present form from 
all eternity, we might think of it as self-existent from 
and through all time to all eternity. Once the idea of 
a beginning is admitted, however, we must apparently 
likewise admit the idea of a cause. This cause man 
calls God. 


Ligut anp Heat 


“And God said: Let there be lights in the firmament 
of heaven.” — Here again human knowledge seems to 
lend its corroborative evidence. The normal condi- 
tions of space are apparently darkness and cold. Light 
and heat are positive phenomena, somehow myste- 
riously projected into the purely negative conditions 

1 


2 EvoLuTIion AND RELIGION 


of darkness and cold. Whence they came we cannot 
dogmatically say. 


Lire 


“And God said: Let the waters swarm with swarms 
of living creatures and let fowl fly above the earth on the 
jace of the expanse of the heaven.” — Here, too, the most 
pronounced, advanced evolutionist recognizes the truth 
of simple statement. ‘The normal conditions of space 
are not only darkness and cold, but apparently death. 
Life projected into the purely negative condition of 
non-life is as positive a phenomenon as light projected 
into darkness, or heat into cold. Whence that life 
came, again we cannot absolutely say. 


Man 


“And God said: Let us make man in our image, after 
our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of 
the sea and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle 
and over all the earth.’’ —'This would appear to be an 
admirably simple and compact statement of the crown- 
ing positive phenomenon of creation, when interpreted 
in its true evolutionary sense of a gradual development. 
Man, who is to have dominion over all the earth, 
emerges first upon the scene. He is to have dominion, 
not only over all the other forms of animal life, but 
over the earth itself, with its hidden wealth, its as yet 
unfolded mysterious forces, which are to be subjugated 
to his will and become his obedient servants. He is to 
discover and control the positive phenomena of light, 


INTELLIGENCE 3 


heat, growth, fire, steam, electricity. He is to sub- 
jugate the lower animals and make them do his bidding. 
He is to invent tools and weapons; to hunt; to shepherd 
flocks and herd cattle; to till the earth for grains and 
fruits needful for his existence. 


INTELLIGENCE 


And how will this be brought about? Not without 
struggle and sacrifice, you may be sure, those appar- 
ently indispensable concomitants of all life, all progress. 
But there has developed through countless ages within 
the head of this new animal, man, a brain. What that 
brain may be in its inmost essence, neither you nor I 
know, nor probably ever will know. All we can say is 
that the entire effort of creation appears to have been a 
labor and a struggle until it has produced its crowning 
glory, a being with a thinking, reasoning, intelligent 
mind. It seems a far cry from the low bestial nature 
of an Australian or South African bushman to the 
god-like intelligence of a Socrates or Plato; and in this 
connection I must put you on your guard against the 
danger of overlooking degeneracy, which seems to be 
quite as important a factor in life as upward evolution. 
But in the long run, the degenerate must be wiped out 
by the very law of evolution; so that while steadily 
recognizing his inevitable presence, we can still sub- 
ordinate him to the higher general law, and in fact 
make him subservient to it. 


4 EvoLuTION AND RELIGION 


APPARENT HELPLESSNESS 


Man is born one of the weakest of all the animals. 
Physically, he has no weapons of offense or defense 
worth considering, when compared with the jaws of 
the lion, the claws of the tiger, the tusks of the elephant, 
the fore-arms of the gorilla, the poison fangs of the 
cobra, or the purely defensive armor of so inoffensive 
an animal as the armadillo. Yet through that same 
divine spark of intelligence within his brain, he fashions 
tools and weapons which make him more than a match 
for these formidable competitors in the race for life. 


PROLONGED INFANCY 


His period of infancy, again, far outlasts theirs. Their 
term of helplessness at the farthest seldom exceeds a 
year or two. His is at least seven times as long. Yet 
during this long period of apprenticeship he is slowly 
but surely ripening that god-like faculty which in the 
end will give him the mastery over them. Nay, more, 
the imperative conditions of this prolonged period of 
comparative helplessness are the very factors which 
will develop within him, against his will or not, the 
sense of gregariousness, race solidarity, sympathy, love; 
qualities against which the inferior sense, developed 
similarly in the lower animals during their shorter 
term of helplessness in their family life, has proved 
utterly powerless. 


Race ror Lire 5 


Race ror Lire 


“And God blessed them,” i.e., the animals, “ saying: 
Be fruitful and multiply. ... And God blessed them, i.e., 
man, male and female, and said unto them: Be fruitful, 
and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; 
and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the 
fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth 
upon the earth.” — Here are the conditions of the 
struggle appositely set. The voice of God, speaking 
through the imperious, universal instinct implanted in 
every form of life, urges toward increase of species. 
If the lower animals increase beyond their due propor- 
tion, man will be swept off the earth. If, on the other 
hand, man increase beyond his due proportion, they 
in their turn will be exterminated. Man is saved not 
alone by his ever-increasing intelligence, but by the 
internecine strife prevalent from the beginning amongst 
the lower animals themselves. They feed upon, they 
attempt to exterminate each other. It is the law of the 
jungle, wherein the strong preys upon the weak, a law 
which leads to the survival of the healthier, stronger, 
more beautiful types. 


Man’s Trrumpu 


Man, too, is forced by the conditions of his lot to 
_ participate in this strife, both against the lower animals 
and against his own kind; but his dawning intelligence 
soon leads him to see that in certain cases, at least, it 
will better suit the purpose of his survival to domesti- 


6 EvoLutTIOonN AND RELIGION 


cate rather than to exterminate, to enslave rather than 
kill. Hence his protecting care over flocks of sheep, 
herds of cattle, fish hatcheries; his friendship for dog 
and cat; all of whom he will ward against the attacks 
of other forms of life. Hence, too, his institution of 
human slavery. Against the so-called pernicious forms 
of lower life, z.e., those that militate against his survival, 
he will indeed wage unrelenting warfare, calling into 
that service the very instincts which the struggle for 
existence has developed in the various inferior species 
who serve him. Sometimes, as in the case of the 
buffalo, he will be foolishly short-sighted, though not 
without protest from the wiser and more far-sighted of 
his race. But his subjugation of the wolves, the bears, 
the lions and tigers, the rattlesnakes and cobras, and 

all forms of life inimical to his welfare, is ever subject i 
to the general law of providing for his own survival. 
He may indeed make serious mistakes at times, as when 
his indiscriminate slaughter of bird life leads him to 
destroy forms of life which are beneficial to him by 
reason of their attacks on pernicious forms of lower 
life. But in the end, his reason will prevail; and as he 
comes to understand more clearly their relation to the 
cardinal principle of his own survival, so will he extend 
his protecting care over all the beneficent types of 
lower life. | 


DISEASE 


As man progresses in knowledge and intelligence 
along the path of race infancy which, again, seems to 


OTHER ENEMIES 7 


differentiate him from the lower animals, other more 
subtle forms of lower life make themselves known 
through the universal struggle for existence. These 
are disease germs, whether transmitted through the 
numerous pests which infest his household, or in the 
air which he breathes or the water which he drinks. 
At first, his ignorance and helplessness before these 
obscure enemies of life lead him to attribute their bale- 
ful influence to unseen agencies in the air about him, 
to whom he offers his prayers or utters his threats with 
childish, pathetic earnestness and simplicity. Once, 
however, he has grasped the truth that they too are 
infinitesimal forms of life striving to feed on him, he is 
placed in a more advantageous position to withstand 
their onslaught. No tuberculous germ, no typhoid 
germ can now masquerade as visitations of a hidden, 
offended divinity. ‘They are pernicious forms of lower 
life, pernicious in that they militate against man’s sur- 
vival, and to be met and fought and conquered as such. 


Otuer ENEMIES 


But man in his race for life has many other enemies 
to combat besides the lower types of life, be they wild 
beasts or disease germs. Let me enumerate some of 
the more important ones. Fierce tropical heats, the 

intense cold of northern latitudes, sudden and mys- 

terious blights of crops followed by wasting famines, 

earthquakes, volcanoes, thunderstorms, floods, con- 

flagrations, all militate against his survival as surely 
1 Nassau, Fetichism in West Ajrica, pp. 98, 158. 


8 Evo.LuTion AND RELIGION 


and remorselessly as any wild beast, or as the pestilence 
which stalketh in the darkness. ‘The onslaught of the 
unseen enemy, be it prowling beast of prey, or sudden 
sickness, or benumbing cold, or seismic convulsion, 
appears to come preferably at night, a season which 
ever seems to enhance the terror of the visitation. 
What more natural, then, than to deify the life-giving 
Sun who shall chase all these phantoms of the night 
away ? 


From out this vast unknown phenomenon, 

Strange forces strike upon my wondering soul, 
Rudely impinging on my consciousness: 

The childhood of our race looks through mine eyes. 


With Persia I am viewing Night and Day, 

Darkness and light, gloom spread o’er earth and sea, 
Dispelled and shattered by the heaven-born Sun, 

An ever new, yet time-worn miracle: 

And in that never-ending, ceaseless strife 

Betwixt the powers of darkness and of light, 

I witness Ormazd, Ahriman contend. 


With the Norse warrior I feel heat and cold, 
Summer, then Winter, following in their train; 
I watch the Sun decline from solstice’ heat, 

A pallid orb, to lie enchained for months; 
Then on the glorious resurrection morn 

Of Easter, I behold him rise once more, 

To gain in daily strength, till all mankind 
Shall bow the knee and own his kingly sway: 
And in that never-ending, ceaseless strife 
Betwixt the powers of shuddering cold and heat 
I dimly see grim Jotuns, Odin strive. 


With the wild savage I know vigor, blight, 
Plenty and Famine, health and pestilence: 


Man Acarnst Man 9 


And in that never-ending, ceaseless strife 
Betwixt the powers of mortal good and ill, 
I see strong Gitche Manitou who shields 
From countless devils of the nether world. 


With India I am gazing now on dreams, 

Sleeping or waking, visions of the night, 
Self-conscious thought, or dark sub-consciousness, 
When man lies wrapped in sleep like death profound: 
The eternal Brahm cries, Spirit, God in all, 

All else is Maya; whilst the Buddh of Time 

Speaks only of the present, living Now. 


With Egypt I now look on Life and Death, 
The sacredness of every living part 

Of organized creation, body, soul, 

The temple door, the mystery of sex: 

All is divine in Nature; I can trace 

The Deity descend into the inmost parts 
Of animated life where all is God. 


Man Aacatnst Man 


But of all the enemies wherewith man has had to 
contend in the struggle for life, the fiercest has ever 
been his fellowman. This battle is still on. True, 
the warfare to-day is not so often waged on mere 
battlefields as in days of yore. Wars of that kind have 
possibly grown rarer with man’s so-called upward 
evolution. But the industrial, social, and financial 
_ struggle appears to grow keener with each succeeding 
advance in science and invention. And you will notice 
that while the strife between man and man becomes 
intensified, there has grown up also, gradually, a com- 
petition between certain aggregates of individuals, or 


10 EvoLuTioNn AND RELIGION 


communities. This is apparently part of the evolution 
of our race. Evolution means development; not alone 
development of the individual but of aggregates of 
individuals. It is many-sided. It is correlated, inter- 
related. Its ramifications extend here, there, every- 
where. At first, the struggle for existence would seem 
logically to have been purely personal, or for the family 
at best. Then, gregariousness would be forced upon 
these families by the conditions of life, the need of 
mutual help, when the tribal idea would arise. Later, 
similar but more extended conditions would compel 
the national idea. To-day, the so-called “race” idea 
is beginning. But you will understand that this, while 
representing the apparently logical sequence of the 
development of human society, does not of necessity 
denote its true historical order. ‘That would be to 
repeat the error of Drummond and other theorists, 
- who assume such to be the case. As a matter of fact, 
so far as direct evidence goes, the tribal instincts may 
be older than the family instincts. Really, however, 
all seem to have developed more or less together. 


Fact Versus THEORY 


The evolutionary scene now changes abruptly. We 
come from the realm of theory to the domain of fact. 
According to our theory hitherto, man has been acting 
as we should expect a thoroughly rational, selfish crea- 
ture to act. Were he a simple algebraic quantity, an 
unknown 2x, he could not answer more beautifully, 


Fact Versus THEORY 11 


more exactly to the demands of our intelligence theory. 
The law of his survival calls, in the first place, for his 
extermination of tigers, cobras, and all the other 
enemies of life (when he can get at them), that militate 
against his continued existence. Accordingly, what 
do we find man doing at the earliest dawn of recorded 
history? Is he engaged in this unrelenting warfare 
against these pernicious forms of lower life? Perni- 
cious fiddlesticks. The absurd creature is actually 
engaged in worshiping them as sacred, higher forms 
of life. Instead of a ruthless warfare against them, as 
his reason ought to dictate, the silly creature is so irra- 
tional as to be protecting these dangerous forms of life, 
so that if any one kills these animals wilfully he is 
immediately put to death himself. Was there ever 
such an outrageously exasperating creature as man 
devised or invented; so deliciously whimsical, so abso- 
lutely contrary, so upsetting to all beautiful, mathe- 
matically exact theories concerning his struggle with 


the enemies of life? Even to this day the tiger is wor- 
shiped in parts of India.2 The inhabitants of Sumatra _ 
are unwilling to destroy the same animals for super- — 
stitious reasons, although they commit frightful rav- 


es.2 The Kamtschatkans still pay a religious regard 
ag pay g g 


1 Herodotus, Book TI, § 65. 

2 Pritchard’s Physical Hist. vol. IV. p. 501. Compare Transac- 
tions of Asiatic Society, vol. III. p. 66; Coleman’s Mythology of the 
Hindus, p. 321. 

3 Marsden’s History of Sumatra, pp. 149, 254. Buckle’s Hist. of 
Civ, vol. I. p. 90, 


12 EvoLuTion AND RELIGION 


; to bears.‘ In Abyssinia hyenas are considered en- 
chanters.?_ The serpent has been worshiped the world 
over. And that this superstitious regard has been 
handed down from time immemorial, or that it is not 
merely circumscribed or local, consider man’s wide- 
spread, primitive belief in the transmigration of souls, 
a belief which rendered almost all animal life sacred. 
Metempsychosis has been common to Brahmanism in 
India, to Buddhism in China, Japan, Siam, Ceylon, 
Nepaul, and Thibet, to the religion of ancient Egypt, 
to the speculative thought of Chaldea, Persia, and 
Greece.‘ We find it in its lowest forms to-day among 
several tribes of Africa and America, which believe 
“that the soul, immediately after death, must look out 
for a new owner, and, if need be, enter even the body 
of an animal.” ® 


STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 


What is the matter then? Is our theory wrong? 
Not necessarily. I would not have you take such an 
extreme position as that; for what appears to be the 
_ best thought of our time seems to be tending more and 
more toward accepting the doctrine of evolution, only 


1 Grieve’s Hist. of Kamtschatka, p. 205. Erman’s Siberia, vol. I. 
p. 492; vol. IT. pp. 42, 43. 

2 Murray’s Lije of Bruce, p. 472. 

3 Matter’s Histoire du Gnosticisme, vol. I. p. 380, Paris, 1828. 
See all these authorities collated in Buckle, vol. I. p. 90. 

4G. E. Lessing, Dass mehr als fiinf sinne fiir den Menschen sein 
kénnen, Conclusion. See Int. Cyc. vol. XIV. p. 538. 

5 Ibid. p. 534, 


ALTRUISM 13 


with profound modifications of interpretation; modifi- 
cations which in all probability will increase as man’s 
vision of truth enlarges. But one thing seems to be 
certain. The theory of a universal, remorseless struggle 
for existence between man and the more formidable 
of his animal foes does not square with the facts so 
far as we know them. For this is no transient, unim- 
portant departure from the truth of the theory, such as 
we saw in the case of man’s short-sighted treatment of 
the buffalo, or of beneficent forms of bird life. This 
is no local, circumscribed mistake of only temporary 
effect. It seems to be fundamental. Metempsychosis 
appears to have been well-nigh universal as a belief, 
not alone among primitive man, not only in the Egyp- 
tian, Indian, and far Eastern civilizations, in the Chal- 
dean, Persian, and Greek speculative beliefs; but it 
prevails even to-day in over one half of the human race. 
To say that man’s ignorance has caused it, that it has 
all been due to a mistake on man’s part, does not 
help out the theory in the least. Whatever the cause 
or causes, the theory does not seem to square with the 
facts. 'To upbraid man for his superstitious fears 
which have made us modify our mathematically pre- 
cise theory would be to show even greater childishness 
in the way of intellectual petulance than he has shown 
in the way of childish fear. 


ALTRUISM 


The same failure of our evolutionary theory to square 
directly and fully with the facts in the case, you will 


14 EvoLuTION AND RELIGION 


find when you come to study the supposedly ruthless 
struggle between man and man. Between rival tribes, 
nations, and races, between rival families, or heads of 
families, this relentless strife appears to have been 
indeed true; but from the earliest dawn of history, 
since man was first forced into gregariousness, co- 
operation rather than individual competition seems 
more often to have been the rule within the narrower 
limits of family or tribe. The higher, more altruistic 
principle has overlaid the lower-and more selfish one. 
The same is true even in the case of the so-called lower 
animals, both the higher guadrumana, and insects like 
ants and bees. It is not a purely selfish struggle for 
individual existence which prevails, but a struggle for 
family, tribe, or race survival. In other words, the 
struggle for life is not the selfish strife which a hasty 
interpretation would put upon evolution’s great gen- 
eralization. ‘The instinct of self-preservation guards 
sufficiently the interests of self. But the struggle for 
existence appears to be a struggle for family, clan, or 
race. So pronounced has this phenomenon been in the 
history of man, and also of some of the lower orders of 
creation, that oftentimes we find the individual volun- 
tarily relinquishing his own personal selfish interests, 
his life even, to merge them in the larger, more un- 
selfish interests of family or clan. Otherwise, how 
shall you explain satisfactorily the phenomena of 
maternal devotion, parental self-sacrifice, brotherly 
love, friendship, fealty to tribe or organization, patriot- 
ism; in a word, race loyalty? ‘The theory of a ruthless 


Man 1s CompLex 15 


struggle cor each individual self does not apparently 
admit of such soft-hearted virtues as these. Indeed, 
it would appear as though it were rather the vey 
struggle for existence between rival families, tribes, | 
nations, and races, which had largely compelled man ! 
to develop his unselfish virtues, to submerge self in 
what proves to be an at least limited altruism; precisely 
as it has done amongst the animals of the jungle. 


Man 1s Complex 


Let us therefore frankly admit that our theory, as 
hitherto presented, has been only partly true; that it is 
at best only a guess at partial truth. There are other 
factors entering into the problem which will profoundly 
modify, or add to, the theory of a ruthless and purely 
selfish struggle for existence. Not only x but y and 2, 
and for all I know the twenty-three other letters of 
the alphabet, may yet have to represent man in our 
algebraic formula of the complex problem which he 
presents. For there would seem to be many other facul- 
ties or qualities besides reason that enter into man’s 
make-up. Man is not pure intelligence or thought 
only. Man is also emotion or feeling. Man is like- 
wise will or volition. His appears to be a sacred mind 
trinity, without any one of which he is incomplete; for 
will, too, seems to stand as final arbiter between the 
conflicting claims of intellect and emotion. On his 
animal side, moreover, man is largely instinct, a « 
quality which relates him to the lower animals, thus r 
showing his probable derivation. On his spiritual 


16 EvoLutTion AND RELIGION 


side, he rises at times to the height and dignity of soul, 
an attribute which connects him with what we call the 
divine in nature, thus showing his possible destiny. 
Even his intelligence is subdivided into several factors, 
one of which, imagination, runs away entirely at times 
with the rest of the man, emotion, volition, instinct, 
soul, memory, perception, reason and all. Even his 
emotions are subdivided into several passions, one of 
which, fear, gallops away in like manner at times with 
the whole man. Hence, you see what a complex 
creature you are dealing with. Any attempt to formu- 
late a thoroughly rounded, complete philosophy of life 
based on only one of man’s faculties is doomed to 
disappointment. It is what I call a guess at partial 
truth. 


EMoTION 


You remember how there had developed through 
countless ages within this new animal, man, an_intelli- 
gent, reasoning, thinking mind. That was one side 
of his nature. At the same time, possibly prior to 
it, there was developing within man’s mind another 
side of his nature, an instinctive, unreasoning, loving 
heart. What that heart may be in its inmost essence, 
neither you nor I know, nor probably ever will know. 
All we can say is that the entire effort of creation ap- 
pears to have been, as in the case of man’s brain, a 
labor and a struggle until it has produced its equally 
crowning glory, a being with a great, generous, loving 
heart. 


Man’s Fuut-Rounpep NATURE 17 


Man’s Fuuit-RounpEep NATURE 


This same evolutionary panegyric might be pronounced 
over man’s will, which is still another side of his nature, 
over man’s imagination, over man’s faculty of language; 
in fact over every great attribute, faculty, or quality of 
his rich, many-sided nature. And fortunate it would 
seem to have been for man that his nature is prismatic, 
fortunate that his intellectual ignorance at first saved 
him from following out unchecked and to its rigorous 
logical conclusion the struggle for self before he had 
had time to develop the higher altruistic qualities 
within him. For man is selfish with his head, generous 
with his heart. (If you doubt this, note the difference 
between the sexes.) Unbounded selfishness, the per- 
petual struggle between different selfish entities, each 
striving to absorb all that tended to their own indi- 
vidual advancement regardless of the interests of 
family, tribe, or nation, would have kept man forever 
in anarchy and prevented all progress. (Even the 
common sparrow has risen in the evolutionary scale 
above this point.) Equally unbounded generosity on 
man’s part, on the other hand, would have led to race 
extinction. Each quality seems to have served as an 
indispensable check upon the other. 


SELFISHNESS 


Prominent among the many elements of the large 
debt of gratitude which our race owes to the great- 
hearted originator of the theory of evolution is the 


18 Evo.LutTioN AND RELIGION 


fact that he appears to have put an effectual, lasting 
quietus upon two schools of thought noisily prevalent 
before his time: those who assumed that the founda- 
tion of all morality lay in a form of selfishness, and 
those who assumed that it lay in what would appar- 
ently be only a refinement of the same idea, the prin- 
ciple of greatest happiness. Since Darwin’s time, 
particularly as reinforced by Spencer’s writings, the 
creed of self seems to have lain by the roadside of 
human thought, a deflated wind-bag, punctured by 
the keen lance of this knightly yet modest champion 
of truth. As he puts it himself, if we accept his evo- 
lutionary theory that “the moral sense is fundamentally: 
identical with the social instincts, the reproach of laying 
the foundation of the most noble part of our nature in 
the base principle of selfishness is removed; unless 
indeed the satisfaction which every animal feels when 
it follows its proper instincts, and the dissatisfaction 
felt when prevented, be called selfish, When a man 
risks his life to save that of a fellow creature, it seems 
more appropriate to say that he acts for the general 
good or welfare rather than for the general happiness 
of mankind. No doubt the welfare and the happiness 
of the individual usually coincide; and a contented, 
happy tribe will flourish better than one that is dis- 
contented and unhappy. At an early period in the 
history of man, the expressed wishes of the community 
will have naturally influenced to a large extent the con- 
duct of each member; and as all wish for happiness, 
the “greatest happiness principle” will have become 


WerattH or NATIONS 19 


a most important secondary guide and object. But 
the social instincts, including sympathy, always serve 
as the primary impulse and guide.” * 


Weattu or NATIONS 


In his well-known Wealth of Nations, the foundation 
of our so-called dismal science of Political Economy, 
Adam Smith ascribed all human actions to selfishness, 
enlightened or otherwise.? In his equally important 
but far less known Theory of Moral Sentiments, pub- 
lished some seventeen years earlier, Smith ascribed all 
human actions to sympathy.? The two works would 
appear to have been not antagonistic but supplementary 
to each other, inasmuch as Smith was already deliver- 
ing the lectures which comprehended the fundamentals 
of his later work at least six years prior to the publica- 
tion of his earlier work.‘ But man’s intellect, with 
its inevitable one-sidedness, its customary naive ten- 
dency to exaggerate only its own side of human nature 
(precisely as you may see men doing in the case of their 
several professions, vocations, or specialties in life), has 
taken up the later of Adam Smith’s works alone, and 
attempted to build an imperfect, incomplete philosophy 
of life thereon. As a matter of fact, Smith’s method 
seems to have been an honest, catholic-minded attempt 
to investigate, undisturbed by the interfering action of 


1 The Descent of Man, vol. I. pp. 93, 94. ; 

2 Buckle, Hist. of Civ. vol. II. p. 344. 3 Ibid. p. 348. 

4 Dugald Stewart’s Life of Adam Smith, p. lxxviii., Smith’s Post- 
humous Essays. 


20 EvoLutTion AND RELIGION 


the opposite quality, first the sympathetic side of 
human nature, secondly its selfish side. ‘There would 
appear to have been a profound meaning in his method, 
for the shield of truth ever bears two sides. No human 
being can be called exclusively selfish, no human being 
can be called exclusively sympathetic. And yet Adam 
Smith in his speculative treatises, purely for the pur- 
pose of speculation (as in pure mathematics), seems to 
have separated these two qualities which at heart are 
really inseparable. 


Morar SENTIMENTS 


In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith laid down 
as his one great cardinal principle from which all sub- 
ordinate principles follow, that the general rules of 
morality which we prescribe to ourselves and which 
govern our conduct are only arrived at by observing 
the conduct of others’; and that these general rules of 
morality are ultimately founded upon experience of 
what our moral faculties, our natural sense of merit 
and propriety, approve of or disapprove of.? Is not 
the element of truth in Adam Smith’s principle rather 
that the mob, the undecided, the majority of men, wait 
to take their cue from the leaders of public opinion, the 
masterful ones, the strong spirits among mankind? 
Man, like some of the lower animals, apparently must 
have leaders, leaders of thought as well as leaders of 
action. If what these leaders of thought teach happens 
to answer to a universal racial or social instinct, the 

1Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, p.219. 2 Ibid. p. 220. 


Lirr’s ConpDITIONS 21 


truth of their teaching will be ultimately recognized and 
so become the norm of general conduct. But this only 
pushes the difficulty one step back. These leaders of 
public opinion must get their ruling ideas of conduct 
from some source. They will hardly take them from 
the irresolute mob which is watching to follow their 
lead. I believe that these ideas of conduct are devel- 
oped out of the social conditions of life itself, both 
among leaders and among the people; conditions which, 
so far as we can see, have been made obligatory, have 
been laid down for the express purpose of developing 
moral ideas in this world of ours. ‘True, the leaders 
of human thought will first recognize and formulate 
these rules of conduct; but unless their teachings answer 
to the people’s social instincts (there have been many 
false prophets in the world who have enjoyed a tem- 
porary popularity), their truth will not be permanently 
acknowledged. This is the biological explanation of 
the phenomenon of moral ideas, and therefore it appears 
to my mind the natural one. 


Lire’s CoNnpDITIONS 


A mother’s loving self-sacrifice for her young, a 
father’s self-denial for the welfare of his family, a 
clansman’s supreme sacrifice for the good of his clan, 
a patriotic soldier’s voluntary relinquishment of life 
in order that his nation may live, all seem to be suc- 
cessive or concurrent steps in this evolution of moral 
ideas. They are evolutionary ideals wrought out and 
maintained by practical idealists, without which and 


22 EvoLuTION AND RELIGION 


without whom the world would apparently quickly 
disintegrate in moral chaos. The same fundamental 
idea seems to pervade them all, viz., the imperative 
necessity of subordinating self to the general welfare, 
of sacrificing a personal, present, tangible advantage 
to some possible, nay doubtful, future benefit for family, 
clan, or nation. Do you maintain that all love, too, 
the self-sacrificial love of a mother for her children, 
of a father for his family, of a soldier for his country, 
of a philanthropist for his race, is based in its ultimate 
analysis upon an enlightened selfishness? Then all 
honor to the power which, starting with so humble and 
lowly a form in the evolutionary scale of morals as 
personal selfishness, has been able to evolve through 
the natural conditions of life such higher, nobler forms 
of enlightened selfishness as these. And in such case, 
you must also be prepared to concede to the lower 
animals an almost equal degree of enlightenment and 
of selfishness with man. 


So-CaLLED LowER ANIMALS 


For you will notice that this sentiment of loyalty to 
family, tribe, or race is not confined by any manner 
of means to man alone. Many of the animals of the 
jungle appear to have it as well, some possibly even 
more highly developed than man. Subordination of self 
to the good of the general pack seems to be common to 
baboons, wild dogs, wolves, and other beasts of prey on 
the one hand, to insects like ants and bees on the other. 

1 The Descent of Man, vol. 1. p.'72. 


So-caALLED LowER ANIMALS 23 


Unquestioning subordination of the individual to the 
general welfare would appear to be the rule among 
them, thus forming undoubtedly the germ of what 
develops into a sort of rudimentary brute morality. 
What, then, is the distinction between man and the 
so-called lower animals? Is it his prolonged period 
of infancy, and the opportunity which this gives to 
develop his mind? But the orang-outang does not 
appear to reach adult age until between ten and fifteen, 
an age not much beyond that of human adults in the 
tropics. Is it his intelligence? But many of the 
lower animals too would appear to possess intelligence 
in at least its rudimentary form. Is it his language? 
But they too would seem to have means of communi- 
cating with others of their own species, however im- 
perfectly developed those means may be. Is it his 
emotions, his will? But they too show fear, anger, 
love, etc.; they too show the power of volition. There 
would appear to be a difference in degree, but hardly 
in kind. Man, however, has been defined as a reli- 
gious animal, and I suspect it is here that the cardinal 
difference begins to show itself. The lower animals 
do not seem to manifest the faintest symptoms of 
spiritualizing the powers of nature, the enemies of life, 
as we have seen man doing even in early race infancy. 
They do not appear to live as man does in a constant 
superstitious dread of death, whether for himself or 
for those he loves. True, they will cower before an 
approaching thunderstorm or earthquake, they will 
1 Ibid. p. 18. 


/ 


Q4 EvoLuTion AND RELIGION 


flee in terror from volcanic outburst or conflagration. 
This is the instinct of self-preservation, common to ani- 
mals and men alike. But nothing even remotely 
resembling an attitude of prayer, entreaty, objurgation 
or remonstrance to unseen agencies in the air about 
them, can apparently be detected in them. If that 
dumb brute, the faithful dog, may be said to worship 
anything in nature it is the master whom he sees and 
who feeds him. In this he would seem to approach 
the intellectual level of the positivist or Comtist school 
of thought among mankind, who appear to have se- 
lected the same imperfect, capricious deity as the 
object of their worship. But this can hardly be called 
spiritualizing an unseen power of nature. 


PROGRESS 


Now, if to this so-called religious instinct of man be 
added his apparently infinite capacity for upward 
development, for progress mentally, morally, spiritually, 
(and likewise his equally infinite capacity for downward 
degeneracy along the same lines), I think you will have 
the real factors in life which cardinally differentiate 
him from the so-called lower animals. ‘The animals 
would appear to be comparatively stationary as regards 
progress. Man must apparently either advance or 
retrograde. In other words. there would seem to be 
something more than mind, with its sacred trinity of 
intelligence, emotion, and will, which makes the real 
difference between man and the lower animals who 
appear to possess all these faculties in at least their 


— 


Tue Ipea or Gop 25 


rudimentary form. His progress in all the social phe- 
nomena of life (language, intelligence, invention, prop- 
erty, civilization), seems to be conditioned rather on 
his worship of certain evolutionary ideals which his 
ever-increasing intelligence allows him to hand down 
from generation to generation, thus accumulating for 
the good of the race a constantly growing fund of 
mental, moral, and spiritual truth. Starting with the 
lowly yet mysterious power of spiritualizing the brute 
forces of nature, man rises to the deification of the 
moral ideas which the conditions of life compel within 
him, until finally he evolves the sublime conception of 


God. 


Tue Ipra or Gop 


This idea of God in the heart and mind and soul of 
man, apparently arising out of the very conditions of 
life itself, would seem to be the final answer to the riddle 
of creation, to this sphinx of human destiny. It is the 
supreme evolutionary ideal, the ideal which every 
right-thinking parent appears to consider it necessary 
to first teach his or her child while the mind is yet im- 
pressionable, so that it may acquire the very nature of 
an instinct. In the history of our race, the idea of God 
seems to have been slowly unfolding itself from the 
beginning. It would appear to have been a progressive 
revelation, a gradual unfolding of truth, the result of 


/an upward evolution; or, as Paul expressed it when 


| speaking to the Greeks on Mars Hill, the purpose of 


creation has been “that men should seek God, ij haply 


e 


26 EvoLuTion AND RELIGION 


they might feel after him and find him, though he 1s not 
jar from each one of us.” Whether this idea of God 
be called a special revelation of truth to our race, or 
be regarded as naturally evolved out of life’s condi- 
,tions, apparently matters but little. The main thing is 
‘that our race has the idea of God, that it entertains 
and cherishes a profound, supreme ideal of law and 
beauty, of aspiration and longing, of love and duty. 
For to say that the idea is the product of an upward 
evolution, of a gradual development, really explains 
nothing. That is a mere change of terms, a novel 
method of phrasing. The basic question will always 
remain. Why has such a creature as man _ been 
evolved out of evolutionary conditions of life which 
constrain him to develop a conscience, to deify his 
moral ideas as sacred duties, to spiritualize the unseen 
powers of nature? To answer dogmatically that it 
has all been due to blind chance appears hardly tenable. 
A reasonable, unprejudiced human being would rather 
argue that these upward aspirations and needs of the 
mind and soul tended to prove the probable certainty ~ 
of their ultimate fulfilment. For is it not unthinkable 
to you that the river should rise higher than its source, 
that the part should rise to be greater than the whole, 
that the creature should rise above the creator? 


“A fire-mist and a planet — 
A crystal and a cell — 
A jelly-fish and a saurian, 
And a cave where the cave-men dwell; 
Then a sense of law and beauty, 


SUPERSTITION Q7 


And a face turned from the clod, 
Some call it Evolution 
And others call it God.” 


“A haze on the fair horizon, 
The infinite, tender sky, 
The ripe, rich tints of the corn-fields, 
And the wild geese sailing high — 
And all over upland and lowland 
The charm of the golden-rod, 
Some of us call it Autumn 
And others call it God.” 


“‘Like tides on a crescent sea-beach, 
When the moon is new and thin, 
Into our hearts high yearnings 
Come welling and surging in — 
Come from the mystic ocean, 
Whose rim no foot has trod — 
Some of us call it Longing 
And others call it God.” 


“A picket frozen on duty — 
A mother starved for her brood — 
Socrates drinking the hemlock, 
And Jesus on the rood; 
And millions who, humble and nameless, 
The straight, hard pathway trod — 
Some call it Consecration 
And others call it God.” 4 


SUPERSTITION 


Let us now return to man and his primitive beliefs. 
You have seen how man’s emotion of fear interfered 


1W. H. Carruth, Each in His Own Tongue. 


28 EvoLuTIoN AND RELIGION 


with his struggle for existence against the more danger- 
ous of his animal foes. You have seen how man’s 
social instincts, his emotions of love and sympathy, 
interfered with his personal, individual struggle for 
life. Is there any necessary connection between the 
two phenomena? ‘The emotions of man, like the 
reasoning powers of man, seem to have been developed 
through struggle and sacrifice. Human love, although 
the mainspring of most of man’s lasting hopes and joys, 
appears likewise to be the source of most of man’s 
abiding fears and sorrows. Apparently we cannot 
have one without the other. They are part of the 
warp and woof of life. Born among the weakest of 
all animals, with a prolonged period of infancy, race 
infancy as well as individual infancy, man is compelled 
by the very conditions of his long period of compara- 
tive helplessness to combine for mutual help against 
the enemies of his life, in family, tribe, and nation. 
Hence arises the sentiment of dependence on others, 
of protection over others, of race solidarity, of sym- 
pathy, of love; qualities which, as you have seen, 
eventually give him the mastery over the lower animals 
with their inferior sense of the same qualities developed 
through their shorter term of helplessness. But the 
law of mortality, which smites down the individual and 
yet spares the family, tribe, nation, or race, keeps 
forcing itself persistently upon man’s attention. It 
constantly invades this sentiment of love which has 
been naturally evolved through family, tribal, and 
national life, thus arresting man’s attention to survival 


SUPERSTITION 29 


of race as opposed to survival of self, whether he will 
or no. If death never invaded this sentiment, man 
would take life for granted and never think about the 
continuance of life, or survival, whether of his race in 
this world or of those he has loved and lost in some 
world to come. This idea of survival, I thik you 
will find at the core of all early man’s beliefs. It is 
the meaning of the word superstition. Says a writer: 
“Those who escaped in battle or survived death were 
called superstites, superstitiost, or survivors. Cicero 
says, ‘they who prayed all day that their children 
might overlive them were called superstitious.’ Lac- 
tantius objects to this derivation, but says the word 
got its meaning from the worship of deceased parents 
and relations by the superstites or survivors, or from 
men holding the memory of the dead in superstitious 
veneration. Thus Cicero and Lactantius agree in 
connecting the origin of the word with the relations 
between the dead and the living who survive them. 
Cicero gave it his sanction when he wished to conse- 
crate the image of his dead daughter to the gods, who, 
he did not hesitate to affirm, were men who had sur- 
vived death. In any case the word originated in some 
mysterious connection between the dead and the living, 
the deceased and those who survived, the world that is 
seen and the world that is unseen; whether it might be 
that it arose from the ‘ promise made to the seed of the 
woman, and it was considered a great misfortune to 
die childless, or to survive one’s children; or that the 
death of one person might be influenced by the death 


30 Evo.utTion AND RELIGION 


of another. The word ‘survival,’ then, best defines 


‘superstition.’ ” * 


RacrE SURVIVAL 


You have seen how before the obscure enemies of 
his life, known now as disease germs, man offered his 
pathetic prayers or uttered his childish threats to the 
unseen agencies in the air about him. You have seen 
how he deified the life-giving sun who chased away all 
the phantoms of the night; how he worshiped heat and 
cold; the divinity which brought pestilence, the divinity 
which brought back health; the divinity which brought 
famine, the divinity which brought back plenty; the 
spirits which resided in thunderstorm, earthquake, 
flood, volcano, and conflagration. Man appears to 
have worshiped everything from which he apprehended 


danger; man seems also to have worshiped everything 
from which he received good, in the sense of its being 


favorable to life. The motive of his worship has | 


apparently been either fear or gratitude; the basis 
has been love: fear or gratitude for those whom he 
loved, always not excluding himself. The immediate 


cause of his worship seems to have been ignorance or | 


helplessness before the obscure, the mysterious, the 

unknown, the terrible, in the death-compelling or life- 

giving agencies which encircled him. Among these 

death-compelling agencies stood certain of the wild 

animals also. These, too, he worshiped, holding them 

as sacred. But all through this deification of the ideas 
1 Int. Cyc. vol. XIV. p. 94. 


Mora Ipras 31 


of life and death in their many forms his motive would 
appear to have been plain: to avert death from those 
he loved, and thus wittingly or unwittingly to secure 
the survival of his race. 


Mora IpEas 


It is here, I think, that we can most satisfactorily 
account for the moral ideas which the fears and loves 
wrought through this evolutionary struggle have de- 
veloped in our race. For as man progressed upward, 
finding many enemies in the path of his survival, you 
saw how he duly deified the wild beasts that endangered 
his life. Then followed mysterious diseases, blasting 
heats, freezing colds, panic-breeding earthquakes, vol- 
canoes, floods, thunderstorms, conflagrations, the spirits 
of which healso duly attempted to pacify by sacrifice and 
oblation. Last of all seems to have come the idea of 
spirits of good as opposed to these powers of evil, of 
divinities which brought back to earth warmth after 
winter, coolness after oppressive summer heat; of 
spirits which gave plenty after famine, health after 
pestilence, peace after war; of spirits of good which 
stilled the violence of passing thunderstorms, earth- 
quakes, volcanic outbursts, floods, or raging conflagra- 
tions. In other words, man was spiritualizing the idea 
of survival from the many enemies that assailed his 
life or the lives of those he loved. And inextricably 
intertwined with it came the new idea, likewise born 
from the same evolutionary stress of life, of the survival 
of his race as opposed to the survival of himself, an 


32 Evo.LutTion AND RELIGION 


idea apparently equally founded upon fear of life’s 
enemies and upon love for the members of his family 
or clan. Of course in one sense, the primary sense, 
survival of race was directly conditioned for a while on 
survival of self. But there was a higher, a secondary 
sense, wherein man found that it was necessary for 
him to subordinate love of self in order that his family, 
his tribe, his race, might live. Conduct on his part 
which should be thought to militate against this sur- 
vival of family, clan, or nation would be considered 
unmoral. (The word morality means, etymologically, 
a custom, a habit, a way of life.) Conduct on his part 
which should be thought to favor and help forward 
this survival, would be considered moral. This con-. 
viction percolating through society, but probably first 
recognized and formulated by leaders of human thought, 
is what in my opinion gave birth to the root idea of all 
our moral ideas. It seems to have been born, like all 
root ideas, out of race experience. 


SACRIFICE 


The same rudimentary idea of morality prevails, as 
you have seen, in many of the lower animals. They, 
however, do not appear to possess the faculty of spir- 
itualizing either the unseen powers of the universe nor 
the moral ideas which have been produced in them by 
. the evolutionary stress of life. Hence they remain 
comparatively stationary as regards progress. But 
man spiritualizes what he fears. He fears the natural 
enemies of his life. He likewise fears his own moral 


SACRIFICE 33 


ideas. They are often irksome to him. They form a 
sort of spiritual tyranny. Why? Simply because, 
like all the unseen forces which militate against his 
survival, they seem to demand sacrifice. ‘The evolu- 
tion of a mother willing to sacrifice even her life, if 
necessary, for the sake of her offspring, is followed 
naturally by the evolution of a father, influenced by her 
example, and ready to lay aside the purely selfish instinct 
of self-preservation in order to preserve the life of 
his family. Push the investigation one step further 
into the family clan and you have loyalty to tribe, 
whereby individual members sacrifice their lives for 
the preservation of the clan. Another step brings you 
to the idea of the nation, with its militant patriotism. 
Still another step introduces you to the idea of race and 
race loyalty. In all these enlarged stages of man’s 
upward progress, his struggle for existence becomes 
widened, through fear and love, from a purely personal 
struggle for self to a struggle for others as well, in 
family, community, national and race life. In all these 
successive, or concurrent, steps there is the same fun- 
damental idea, that of sacrificing the personal to the 
general, the present to the future, which in reality 
seems to form the basis of all moral ideas. In other 
words, a very tangible, present, personal advantage is 
given up for a possible future benefit to family, clan, 
nation, or race. Selfishness gives place to altruism. 
The regard of and for others, in short, becomes man’s 
creed of moral and religious duty. 


34 EvoLuTion AND RELIGION 


Varyinc Morav Ipras 


In speaking of one of the lowest peoples on earth in 
the evolutionary scale to-day (but whether a decadent 


race or simply an undeveloped one remains yet to be 


proved), Darwin says: “ While observing the barbarous 
inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, it struck me that the 
possession of some property, a fixed abode, and the 
union of many families under a chief, were the indis- 
pensable requisites for civilization.” + This seems to 
be undoubtedly true; though there are other indis- 
pensable factors as well which appear to enter into the 
complex problem of civilization. But confining our- 
selves for the moment to his three, how can you per- 
manently maintain the idea of the sacredness of property 
rights if the individual has not yet been brought through 
some means of suasion, moral or otherwise, to learn 
to subdue his purely selfish passion of covetousness ? 
How can you maintain the idea of the sanctity of the 
home and family life if the individual has not yet 
learned to control his purely selfish passion of lust? 
How can you maintain tribal life under a chief if the 
individual has not yet learned to subordinate his purely 
selfish interests to the general welfare of the community ? 
This self-control by the individual would appear to 
be the one indispensable basis of all community life, 
both among men and among the gregarious animals 
as well. But as man’s mental horizon of what consti- 
tutes the general widens, so will his ideas of morality 
1 The Descent of Man, vol. I. pp. 160, 161. 


QO 


Varyinc Morat IpgEaAs 35 


broaden and become enlarged. This apparently would 
be the probable explanation of many of the varying 
codes of morals which to-day puzzle the student of 
history. Robbery, treachery, murder, within the limits 
of the tribe, were regarded always as unpardonable 
offenses. When exercised toward outsiders, however, 
they were not considered crimes. ‘To the purely mili- 
tant civilizations of early Greece and Rome, self-sacri- 
fice for the benefit of the state would naturally be the 
highest of all virtues. To the Hebrew law-giver with 
his clearer insight into the race needs of the future, 
righteousness, or right living, would form the basic 
corner-stone of all morality. “For I the Lord thy God 
am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers 
upon the children, wpon the third and upon the fourth 
generation of them that hate me, and showing mercy unto 
a thousand generations of them that love me and keep 
my commandments.” If a man has only reached the 
stage of development where he can but see the neces- 
sity of subordinating survival of self to survival of 
family, it seems inevitable that his sense of duty will 
be circumscribed by his narrower mental horizon of 
sympathy. If a man, or people, have succeeded in 
reaching the stage where they can see the need of 
subordinating survival of self to the survival of tribe, 
nation, or race, then their sense of duty will become 
enlarged to correspond with their enlarged sympathy. 
One love will apparently not drive out the other, 
but will transcend it. At times, it is true, these larger 
- loves may interfere in their action with one another; 


36 EvoLuTION AND RELIGION 


and this will still further complicate man’s moral codes. 
Thus a man may hesitate to offer his life a sacrifice to 
his clan or country, not because of self-love, but on 
account of his more unselfish love of family. Ora man 
may refuse to go forth to battle for his country because 
of his larger love for the race. 


Tue GENERAL Goop 


But man’s ideas of morality have also varied widely 
as regards what constitutes the general good of the 
community. Here is where man’s imperfect, self- 
deceiving intellect would appear to have often played 
him false. His social, moral instincts impel him to 
place the general welfare in advance of everything else; 
but his selfish, tricky, self-sufficient intellect will 
mislead him, if it possibly can, as to what that general 
welfare really is. ‘Those rude early tribes who prac- 
tised infanticide would seem to have done so from 
equally honest but mistakenly selfish motives with 
those who practise race-suicide to-day. Those primi- 
tive peoples who regarded suicide as anything but dis- 
honorable would appear to differ only slightly from 
many of our modern clubmen who engage, with a 
_ spirit of senseless bravado, in the same foolish prac- 
tise — only in a more leisurely way, in a sort of slow 
suicide. Intemperance and licentiousness both seem 
to be self-destroying errors into which our race has 
fallen largely through this same overweening conceit of 
intellect. Certainly the brutes with their less developed 
intellects, but almost equally developed social instincts 


Tur GENERAL Goop 37 


with man, would appear to be free from all unnatural 
crimes which militate directly against their own race 
survival. “The instincts of the lower animals,” says 
Darwin, “are never so perverted as to lead them reg- 
ularly to destroy their own offspring,” *— and, he 
might have added, “or themselves,” in the case at 
least of the higher gregarious animals. A thief who 
preys upon his own kind, a sensualist who sacrifices the 
young of his or her own race to his or her selfish lust, a 
parasite who lives upon his fellows, in a word the spoilers 
and exploiters of mankind, would seem to violate the 
moral law of their own race, 7.e., the general welfare, 
in a way which the lowest gregarious animal would not 
be guilty of habitually. True, the lower animals will 
sometimes “expel a wounded animal from the herd, 
or gore or worry it to death. This is almost the 
blackest fact in natural history, unless indeed the 
explanation which has been suggested is true, that their 
instinct or reason leads them to expel an injured com- 
panion lest beasts of prey, including man, should be 
tempted to follow the troop,” ? — thus aiding instead 
of militating against race survival, thus helping on the 
good of the general. Darwin defined the term “gen- 
eral good” as “the rearing of the greatest possible num- 
ber of individuals in full vigor and health and with all 
their faculties perfect, under the conditions to which 
they are exposed.” * In his view of the future of our 
race he would seem to incline to the view that selec- 


1 The Descent of Man, vol. I. p. 129. 
2 Ibid. p. 73. 3 Ibid. p. 94. 


38 Evo.LutTion oF RELIGION 


tion must continue to be an important factor in evo- 
lution, and hence that it is not well to check the 
scope of that principle by a charitable preservation of 
the incompetent.'’ But why stop merely at the incom- 
petent? Do not the spoilers and the exploiters of our 
race, the criminal, the vicious, the parasitic among 
mankind, militate equally, if not more, against the 
general good? Does not the selfishly egotistical class 
equally jeopardize the survival of the truly fittest? 
Life is undoubtedly a fight, a struggle for existence; 
but there is such a thing as fighting fair and fighting 
foul. ‘There is such a thing as striking below the belt, 
or being open and above-board in one’s blows. There 
is such a thing as playing the game squarely and letting 
the best man win, or playing crooked, with stacked 
cards and loaded dice, thus allowing the lecher, the 
thief, and the parasite to issue triumphant. If our 
view of mankind is not to rise above the level of that 
of a sort of sublimated “stock farm,” in all conscience 
let us see to it that the stock farm idea be carried out to 
its rigorous logical conclusion. Let us make the con- 
ditions of the game as severe as we please, but let us 
also apply those conditions with rigid impartiality to 
all alike. Let us make all men abide by the rules of 
the game, so that the truly fittest shall really survive. 


SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 


You have seen, therefore, that man’s intelligence as 
well as man’s emotions can lead him occasionally to 
1 Int, Cyc. vol. IV. p. 617. 


SURVIVAL OF THE Firrest 39 


err against the law of race survival. Mistakes of 
intelligence in recognizing what constitutes the real 
general good would seem to retard his progress quite 
as materially as excessive emotionalism. Whether the 
evils resulting from over-emotionalism in fear and 
love have proved any greater to our race than those 
resulting from defective intellect and excess of im- 
agination, is a nice question, but hardly pertinent to 
the present inquiry. Few things, however, are more 
suggestive to a thinking mind to-day than to contem- 
plate the heavy self-complacency with which the 
average man in the street persists in misinterpreting 
Spencer’s catch-phrase, the survival of the fittest. It 
subtly tickles his vanity to believe that he is one of the 
fittest, 7.e., the present best, as he reads the intellectual 
legend, evolved out of a prolonged period of upward 
evolutionary stress. It soothes his conscience to 
believe that in this struggle for life wherein he thinks 
he has issued triumphant, he is justified in adopting 
the ethical standards of the jungle as between differing 
races of animals. Had Spencer realized how his 
catch-phrase would be quoted in canting self-justifica- 
tion by every semi-educated exploiter of mankind who 
prefers to remain animal and prey upon human beings 
rather than to rise to the dignity of manhood, I imagine 
he would gladly have amplified or qualified the phrase 
to meet such cases of limited intelligence. For these are 
the ones that sin against the survival of their own kind, 
those who sneer or scoff at the ideals of their own race. 
And yet it would not seem to require superhuman 


40 EvoLuTion AND RELIGION 


wisdom to see on whose side besotted folly lies. As 
you instinctively know, one sane, practical idealist in 
a community is worth in point of social efficiency a ton 
of such self-blinded egoists. The fittest to survive will 
indeed survive, but this is very different from imagining 
that in our present concededly imperfect stage of evo- 
lutionary development, every living organism to-day is 
necessarily one of the best. Our race can hardly be 
said to have reached perfection yet. On the contrary, 
we are being tried out daily, hourly, by a _relent- 
less evolutionary process under which degenerates of 
all kinds, mental, moral, physical, must inevitably be 
ultimately wiped out. All that survival of the fittest 
appears to mean, therefore, is that those types most 
fitted to withstand life’s enemies will continue to live 
and multiply, while those less adapted will disappear. 
Hence, did these imperfectly developed or decadent 
specimens of our race but know it, Nature is as re- 
morselessly weeding out them, or their posterity, 
through their very vices, as she is the consumptive and 
the anemic among individuals, or the dying races among 
the peoples of the world. 


HuMANITY 


If I were asked to name the distinguishing charac- 
teristic of our modern Western civilization as contrasted 
with those that have immediately preceded it, I should 
answer unhesitatingly, that it appears to consist mainly 
in an increased regard for all forms of life, both animal 
and human. If the evolutionary theory had done 


HuMANItTy 41 


nothing else, it would at least deserve our lasting 
gratitude for having enlarged man’s conception, and 
strengthened his conviction, of the intimate kinship 
between all forms of created being. Life seems to be 
the one undoubtedly sacred thing in life. What this 
world needed was apparently a new baptism into this 
sacredness of all life which is not inimical to higher 
forms of life. “Thou shalt not kill,” would appear 
to have been confined, as a commandment in man’s 
moral law, not to man alone. It seems to have been 
meant to extend to all forms of created life which are 
not pernicious per se in the sense of militating against 
man’s survival, or which cannot be used to further that 
survival. Among the more backward peoples of Chris- 
tendom where ignorance is the rule among the masses, 
brutality still undoubtedly prevails; but even here the 
leaven of humanity is working slowly but surely. In 
the more advanced nations of Christendom, the phe- 
nomenon is so patent that at times it assumes almost 
an absurdly exaggerated aspect. The people of the 
East, with their religious belief in metempsychosis, 
would appear to be decidedly in advance of the more 
backward Western nations in this respect. And yet, 
even among the latter we have had from the beginning 
the ideal uttered by the founder of the Christian reli- 
gion (and hence to be received with the reverence due 
to the utterances of all unveilers of new evolutionary 
ideals) of the humble sparrows, “not one of whom shall 
jall on the ground without your Father,” “not one of 
whom is forgotten in the sight of Him” who “jeedeth 


42 EvoLuTION AND RELIGION 


the ravens, though they sow not, neither reap,” who 
“clotheth the lilies of the field, though they toil not, 
neither do they spin.” ‘True, the evolutionary theory 
of a struggle for existence has opened men’s eyes to the 
fact that certain of these forms of lower life (like dis- 
ease germs) would appear to be inimical to man’s 
survival, and hence render it his duty to attempt to 
stamp them out as such. But this is apparently no 
more true of pernicious forms of lower animal or vege- 
table life than it is of pernicious forms of human life, 
which, either through degeneracy or imperfect develop- 
ment, assail the general well-being and threaten the 
survival of the truly fittest. Nature seems to be already 
engaged in slowly blotting out or obliterating these 
degenerate, pernicious breeds among mankind. But 
man is kin to Nature; he is part of Nature. He should 
therefore apparently assist Nature in exterminating or, 
better, sterilizing all decadent breeds which militate 
against the general welfare. We attempt to do this 
in a slipshod, haphazard sort of way at present, with 
our imperfectly developed, and still more imperfectly 
administered, criminal laws. 'The trouble would seem 
to be that we do not begin to go far enough in the truly 
scientific application of our best knowledge to the 
subject of properly eradicating the criminal, the vicious, 
the parasitic, and the worthless. ) 


A DimemMa 


Man’s reason, therefore, seems to bring us logically to 
the point where we must view the world as a sort of 


’ 


A DILEMMA 43 


huge stock farm, and rigorously adopt for our ideal 
toward the race the scientific methods of stock breeding. 
Man’s emotions, you will find, bring us to the point 
where we must regard the race rather as one great 
human family, where kindlier methods are to prevail. 
True, governmental force in the family life appears to 
be likewise a necessity in the extreme case of degenerate 
members who otherwise would assail or destroy the 
organism as a whole. But you can readily see how, 
where love rules, law will be administered not in a 
cold-blooded, scientific spirit (which would probably 
defeat its own ends), but with a desire to conserve 
through proper reforming agencies the family life 
entire including, when possible, that of the offender 
himself. Unless, however, human society can be per- 
suaded or induced somehow to accept this enlarged 
family ideal as its method of dealing with the world’s 
present problem of vice, crime, and parasitism, it would 
seem as if logically and ultimately the race would find 
itself compelled, as a matter of pure self-defense, to 
assist Nature in obliterating all these decadent breeds 
which militate against the general welfare. If the social 
organism were to-day following out solely its intellec- 
tual beliefs to their rigorous logical conclusion, it would 
even now be engaged in this relentless, ruthless task. 
The welfare of the general must apparently be preferred 
to that of the individual. If, therefore, the individual 
is guilty of incorrigible insubordination, if he is perma- 
nently unwilling to subordinate himself to the good of 
the general, then the general will have to do it for him. 


44 EvoLUuTION AND RELIGION 


It is an intellectual cul de sac; I do not see how you 
can possibly escape it. But fortunately for these offen- 
ders against the social organism, man is not always 
strictly logical. Being complex, he allows his emotions 
to influence his cold reason. 


RELIGION 


I have already referred to man’s inveterate tendency 
to spiritualize the many enemies that stand in the way 
of his survival, and likewise to deify the friendly powers 
that seem to help toward that survival. Whatever is 
mysterious, unknown, life-giving, terrible, or death-com- 
pelling, as you saw, becomes a hidden divinity to be 
propitiated by sacrifice; and how perverted the sacrifi- 
cial idea might become in man’s mind, Moloch and 
other juggernauts only too well attest. The motive of 
this tendency appeared to be fear or gratitude, its 
basis, love, as we noticed in the way in which man 
deified all the powers that militated against, or helped 
toward, his own or his family’s continued existence. 
To him now, out of these very conditions of life and 
death, came the new startling idea (forced constantly 
and relentlessly upon his attention by the inevitable 
law of mortality), that he must subordinate individual 
survival of self to survival of race. The idea stood as 
resolutely across the path of self-survival as any one of 
the many enemies of his life. Individual survival was 
ultimately impossible through the very law of mor- 
tality common to all human beings; but survival of 


RELIGION 45 


race was possible, and could even be promoted, by the 
subordination thereto of the individual’s survival. In 
its essence, therefore, the idea was as mysterious, as 
death-compelling, as any terrible wild beast of the 
jungle, as any unknown obscure scourge which militated 
against his own survival. For the race, it was as life- 
giving as any friendly power which helped toward race 
survival. The idea demanded sacrifice. Man, there- 
fore, deified it as a sacred duty. And to deify an idea 
is to make a religion out of it. For you will find that 
the sanctions of religion ever go to reinforce the dictates 
of morality. In fact, morality without religion (for so 
man seems to be constituted) appears bound to become 
a dead letter in the course of one or two generations of 
mankind. Conduct on a man’s part which is thought 
to militate against the survival of family, tribe or nation, 
comes to be regarded not only as unmoral but as sinful; 
as deadly, blighting sin. In other words, such conduct 
is frowned upon by the God in man, by the supreme 
evolutionary ideal of love in mankind, of this universal 
instinct of race preservation. Conduct on a man’s 
part which is thought to help forward this survival 
comes to be considered not only as morally correct 
but as religious. In other words, it is approved of by 
the God in man, again the same supreme ideal of love, 
of the universal race instinct which so wisely places 
race survival at the forefront as the all-important thing 
in life. 


46 EvoLuTioNnN AND RELIGION 


SELF-SACRIFICE 


One difference, however, you will note between this 
new possibly death-compelling idea which man deifies, 
and the other enemies of his life which he has hitherto 
deified. ‘They militated not only against the survival 
of the individual, but against that of the race as well. 
This new idea of survival of race as opposed to survival 
of self, on the other hand, militates against the survival 
of the individual, but its purpose is that the race may 
live. This survival of race was, it is true, equally 
man’s object when he offered sacrifice to his other 
death-compelling enemies. But you will readily see 
how profoundly the new idea will modify the nature of 
his sacrifice. Instead of the necessity of laying violent 
hands upon others, as well as upon himself, and sacri- 
ficing them, willing or unwilling, for the sake of the 
general welfare —a thought which often led to un- 
speakable cruelty, and was summed up in the pithy 
aphorism, “It is better that one should die rather than . 
that all should perish” — man’s central idea becomes 
now the necessity of sacrificing himself for the good of 
his family, tribe, or nation. In other words, the idea 
of sacrifice has begun to give place to that of self- 
sacrifice. And this would seem to mean a wonderful 
step forward in man’s religio-moral development. 


Human BE.IeFrs 


We come now naturally to the religious beliefs of 
mankind, great creeds or systems whereby this supreme 


Human BEtiers 47 


duty of subordinating the personal to the general, the 
present to the future, has ever been sought to be in- 
culcated. On this point, as I am well aware, some 
great thinkers of our race have taken the stand that 
nothing can be profitably said, all religion being, as 
they insist, incapable of proof. If by religion they 
mean human theology, or man’s necessarily fallible 
attempts to reduce the infinite to precise intellectual 
formule of his own devising, their contention is meas- 
urably granted. But religion does not mean that to 
me. Other thinkers, again, affect to despise religion. 
They would seem to be even more unwise. ‘The 
principle of selection never would have seized upon 
religion, never would have developed it through all 
these centuries, as it has done, unless religion had a 
most important, a vital bearing on that principle. And 
if I may be allowed to mildly make the suggestion, 
the principle of selection is possibly a good deal more 
worthy of regard when it comes to deal with the deep, 
intricate subject of man’s survival than any individual’s 
intellect no matter how profound. Of course, when I 
say that the religions of mankind have sought to incul- 
cate the supreme duty of subordinating self to the good 
of the general, I mean the subordination of self with- 
in reason. ‘To be constantly preferring the good of 
others to the exclusion of self in the daily struggle for 
existence is manifestly an impossible absurdity. It 
would put a stop to the play of self-interest, the most 
powerful lever apparently that moves mankind. No 
religion that I know of has ever demanded that we 


48 EvoLuTION AND RELIGION 


should love our neighbor better than ourselves, that 
we should do to others more than we would have 
them do to us. That would be idealism and gener- 
osity run mad. It would mean ultimately, if feasible 
(which it is not), the extinction of the race. But what 
the subordination of self to the general has apparently 
meant in all the religions of the world is, that when 
the personal advantage of the individual comes into 
conflict with, or is antagonized by, the good of the 
general, the former must yield, the latter must prevail. 
Hence, the subordination of self to the general is a 
controlling factor on the play of individual self-interest, 
a restraint in family life, tribal life, national life, and 
race life. And that is precisely what religion means, 
I think, a restraint. 


Two Views or RELIGION 


There are two possible views to take of the religions 
of mankind. One is that they have acted solely as a 
clog, a drag, on the proper development of our race. 
The other is that they have aided in that development. 
In man’s worship or superstitious regard for the more 
dangerous forms of animal life, it would seem at first 
blush as though this widespread, primitive belief had 
most unmistakably militated against his survival. In 
man’s present soft-hearted benevolence towards. the 
incompetent, the selfish, the vicious, and the crim- 
inal of his race, there would seem to be a similar weak- 
ness of the emotions which works against the survival 
of the fittest. But, after all, this is apparently only a 


Two Views or RELIGION 49 


superficial view of the phenomenon. For, however 
much man’s religions may have been marred by intel- 
lectual errors, superstitious beliefs, revolting cruelties, 
or gross practises, at their core there always appears to 
have been some glimmering of the principle of altruism; 
and progress, as we have seen, seems to depend on 
altruism. Sacrifice seems always to have been accom- 
panied sooner or later by self-sacrifice. The purely 
selfish instinct of the individual has become merged in 
the higher social instinct of the general welfare, whether 
the general be confined to family, clan, nation, or race. 
I confidently challenge any one to point out to-day a 
single tribe of human beings so degraded, so degenerate, 
or so undeveloped, that it has succeeded as yet in throw- 
ing off this yoke of duty to the general good in more 
or less limited degree. Even where man wanders about 
in detached family groups of two or three at the most, 
where he has not yet apparently risen to the tribal idea, 
where his intellectual faculties are so low that he cannot 
count above two, this sense of the religious duty of 
subordination of the individual to the general family 
welfare appears to prevail. He must occasionally 
meet in common council; he must unite for common 
defense.’ Co-operation seems to be forced upon him 
by the very conditions of his life. It would appear 
to be precisely the same instinct of race preservation 
which rules among the higher social guadrumana and 
insects, but the distinction is that man raises it through 
his ever-advancing reason from an instinct to an intel- 
1 Descent of Man, vol. I. p. 81. 


50 EvoLutTion AND RELIGION 


ligent, conscious duty, and again through his ever- 
widening spirit from a moral duty to a spiritualized, 
deified religion. 


FEtTIcHISM 


Fetichism, such as we see in Africa to-day, seems to 
be the lowest of all forms of existing religions, a super- 
stitious worship of material things, or fetiches, wherein 
spirits are supposed to abide. Closely connected with 
the belief in magic and witchcraft, necromancy and 
spiritism, it appears to be based mainly on fear of the 
many enemies, seen and unseen, which beset man in 
his struggle for existence. Survivals of this early 
primitive religion may be easily witnessed, even among 
so-called civilized peoples to-day, in their countless 
objects of superstitious regard. As the possible basis, 
however, from which all religion has sprung, it would 
seem to deserve as kindly a notice as the humble amoeba 
in our larger view of the evolution of life. For is it not 
well to remember, in the words of a higher form of 
religion (reading the words always in their true trans- 
posed evolutionary sense), that “the fear of the Lord is 
the beginning of wisdom”? or, in the words of a still 
higher, a kindlier form of religion, that “7 is a fearful 
thing to fall into the hands of the living God”? And 
yet, even in this humble, lowly form of religion, there 
are fetiches to guard the family interests separate from 
the individual fetich with its purely personal, selfish 
interests. Says a writer:' “Respect for the family 

1 Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa, pp. 158-160. 


FErtTICcHISM a 


fetich is cognate to the worship of the spirits of ances- 
tors. Among the Barotse of South Africa, ‘for this 
worship they have altars in their huts made of branches, 
on which they place human bones, but they have no 
images, pictures, or idols. In some cases the bones 
of a beloved father or mother are kept in a wooden 
chest, for which a small house is provided, where the 
son or daughter goes statedly to hold communication 
with their spirits. They do not pretend to have any 
audible response from them, but it is a relief to’ their 
minds in their more serious moods to go and pour out 
all the sorrows of their hearts in the ear of a revered 
parent. This belief, however much of superstition it 
involves, exerts a very powerful influence upon the 
social character of the people.’ In the Benga tribe, 
just north of the equator, in West Africa, this family 
fetich is known by the name of Yaka. . . . The Yaka 
is appealed to in family emergencies. Suppose, for 
instance, that one member has recently done something 
wrong, ¢.g., alone in the forest, he has met and killed a 
member of another family, devastated a neighbor’s 
plantation, or committed any other crime, and is un- 
known to the community as the offender. But the 
powerful Yaka of the injured family has brought 
disease or death, or some other affliction, upon the 
offender’s family. ‘They are dying or otherwise suffer- 
ing, and they do not know the reason why. After the 
failure of ordinary medicines or personal fetiches to 
relieve or heal or prevent the continuance of the evil, 
1 Wilson, Western Africa, p. 393 et seq. Nassau, p. 160. 


52 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


the hidden Yaka is brought out by the chiefs of the 
offender’s family. A doctor is called in consultation, 
the Yaka is to be opened, and its ancestral relic con- 
tents appealed to. At this point the fears of the offender 
overcome him, and he privately calls aside the doctor 
and the older members of the clan. He takes them 
to a quiet spot in the forest and confesses what he has 
done, taking them to the garden he has devastated, or 
to the spot where he had hidden the remains of the 
person he had killed. If this confession were made to 
the public, so that the injured family became aware of 
it, his own life would be at stake. But making it to his 
Yaka, and to only the doctor and chosen representa- 
tives of his family, they are bound to keep his secret; 
the doctor on professional grounds, and his relatives 
on the ground of family solidarity. 'The problem, then, 
is for the doctor to make what seems like an expia- 
tion.” * 


SymBot-WorsHIP 


Over Symbol-worship, or the deification of the re- 
productive powers of Nature, we need not linger long. 
It again marks the infancy of our race, showing man’s 
inveterate tendency to deify whatsoever is mysterious 
and unknown in connection with life, whatever is life- 
giving, as well as what is terrible and death-compelling. 
Its influence may be readily traced in the primitive 
nature-religions of Egypt, India, Assyria, Phoenicia, 
Greece, Italy, Scandinavia, Spain, Mexico, Central 

1 Nassau, Fetichism in West Ajrica, p. 163. 


Tue Great RELIGIONS 53 


America, and Pert. It prevails to-day in its grosser 
forms in the temples of Siva, and among some of the 
savage tribes of both the Old World and the New. 
Symbolism, like fear, apparently enters into all reli- 
gions, often forming the most impressive part of their 
outward ceremonies.‘ And yet, the fact that in many 
of these comparatively high civilizations of ancient 
times it was accompanied by a high order of family, 
tribal, and national life, involving the absolutely in- 
dispensable virtues of unselfishness, loyalty, and 
patriotism, would seem to go to show most unmistak- 
ably that, when divested of its grossness, there was in 
addition something at its core which likewise involved 
the co-operative principle of altruism. That that 
something was the underlying religio-moral idea which 
has been forced upon mankind by the struggle for 
existence which is the invariable condition of all human 
life: the idea of survival of race as opposed to survival 
of self, the supreme, imperative necessity of subordinat- 
ing self-interest to the general welfare, will, I think, be 
readily admitted by those familiar with the early history 
of these bygone peoples. 


Tue GREAT RELIGIONS 


But when we come to the beautiful twin system of 
Zoroaster, with its wondrous spirit of purity breathed 
through a noble liturgy, to the spiritual heights of 
Brahmanism, to the lofty spirit of Buddhism, to the 
reverence for parents and worship of the general well- 

1 Ancient Symbol-W orship, Westropp and Wake, N. Y., 1874. 


54 EvoLuTion AND RELIGION 


being and of common sense in Confucianism, to the 
study of life and death in the religion of Egypt, to the 
regard for law, order, and justice in the religious con- 
stitution of Rome, to the adoration of beauty, strength, 
and wisdom in the fair humanities of Greece, to the 
worship of freedom and courage in the old Norse 
Eddas, — then the evolutionary curtain may be said 
to have risen indeed. Here we may see the evolutionary 
ideals of each people portrayed so that he who runs 
may read, 


Tur GENERAL WELFARE 


And you will notice that the same idea which ap- 
peared to be the basis of the primitive religions of the 
world likewise pervades all these higher religions, 7.e., 
the duty of subordinating self to others, the supreme 
need of personal self-sacrifice for the general good. 
The appeal in them is ever from the individual to the 
general, from the present to the future. Of course, 
man’s idea of the “general” will vary according to the 
evolutionary stage of progress which he has reached. 
At times, it may be confined, as I have already pointed 
out, to his immediate family; at others, it will extend to 
include his tribe; then, his nation; last of all, his race. 
And as this idea enlarges, so will his moral ideals, his 
sense of duty, become extended; so will his religion 
become nobler, purer, higher. Early Judaism, Mo- 
hammedanism, two religions, the one growing out of 
the other, which taught a pure monotheism, insist 
equally upon the duty of personal self-sacrifice for the 


BupDDHISM 55 


general welfare. True, their idea of the general is too 
often circumscribed by a narrow tribal, national, or 
sectarian feeling; as witnessed in Jewish prejudice 
against Canaanite, Samaritan, and Gentile, or in Mos- 
lem hatred of infideldogs. Butevenin one of them there 
are occasional premonitions of the idea that the general 
ought to include the entire human race. Not till we 
come to the visions of the Jewish prophets, to Bud- 
dhism, and to Christianity, however, do we find this 
idea in its full perfection. The higher teachings of 
Israel, the teachings of Gautama, and those of Jesus, 
for the first time in human history, appear to have in- 
sisted upon the supreme necessity, the religious duty, 
of subordinating each individual self to the good of the 
entire race. 


BuppHISM 


Buddhism was a revolt from Brahmanism, the 
revolt of the spirit of humanity against the spirit and 
tyranny of caste. Brahmanism had indeed inculcated 
man’s duties to a fellow-Brahman; Buddhism extended 
and enlarged them to include all created beings. Says 
Max Miiller: “Gautama addressed himself to castes 
and outcasts. He promised salvation to all; and he 
commanded his disciples to preach his doctrine in all 
places and to all men. A sense of duty, extending 
from the narrow limits of the house, the village, and 
the country to the widest circle of mankind; a feeling 
of sympathy and brotherhood towards all men; the 


56 EvoLuTION AND RELIGION 


idea, in fact, of humanity, was in India first pronounced 
by Buddha.” * 


ATHEISM 


A certain element of grim humor was lent to Buddha’s 
excessive revolt against the overwrought spiritualism 
and ritualistic tyranny of Brahmanism by the fact that 
he went so far as to ignore, if not deny, God. But, in 
revenge, his followers soon made short work of this 
cardinal omission by turning around and practically 
deifying the Buddha himself. It is true, their more 
advanced thinkers claim that he is not a God, but only 
the ideal of what any man may become. Yet when 
we consider the exaggerated adoration paid to the 
topes wherein his relics are reputed to lie, and to his 
images in the temples; when we note the sacrificial 
offerings and prayers addressed to him 2500 years 
after his death, it becomes very difficult to grasp this 
subtle, shadowy distinction between the ideal man 
and the deified man. 


UNIVERSAL SYMPATHY 


But however this may be, in the words of another 
writer: “The element in Buddhism which more than 
any other, perhaps, gave it an advantage over all sur- 
rounding religions, and led to its surprising extension, 
was the spirit of universal charity and sympathy that 
it breathed, as contrasted with the exclusiveness of 
caste. In this respect, it held much the same relation 


1 Chips from a German Workshop, vol. I. p. 252. 


CoMMANDMENTS 57 


to Brahmanism that Christianity did to Judaism. It 
was in fact a reaction against the exclusiveness and 
formalism of Brahmanism — an attempt to render it 
more catholic, and to throw off its intolerable burden 
of ceremonies. Buddhism did not expressly abolish 
caste, but only declared that all followers of the Buddha 
who embraced the religious life were thereby released 
from its restrictions; in the bosom of a community who 
had all equally renounced the world, high and low, the 
twice-born Brahman and the outcast were brethren. 
This was the very way Christianity dealt with the 
slavery of the ancient world. The opening of its ranks 
to all classes and to both sexes— for women were 
admitted to equal hopes and privileges with men, and 
one of Gautama’s early female disciples is to be the 
supreme Buddha of a future cycle —no doubt gave 
Buddhism one great advantage over Brahmanism.” ! 


CoMMANDMENTS 


The commandments which Buddha laid down for 
all men in order that they might not suffer greater 
misery in subsequent reincarnations, were five. 

1. Do not kill. 

Do not steal. 

Do not commit adultery. 
Do not lie. 

. Do not be drunken. 

On those entering the religious life in the pursuit of 
Nirvana, he enjoined five more. 


1 Int. Cyc. vol. III. p. 157. 


cal 


58 EvoLuTion AND RELIGION 


1. Abstain from all solid food after midday. 

2. Abstain from dances, singing, and theatrical per- 
formances. 

3. Abstain from all ornaments or perfumery in dress. 

4. Abstain from a lofty and luxurious couch. 

5. Abstain from taking either gold or silver. 

For the monks or ascetics he added five others, still 
more severe. . 

1. Dress in rags, sewed with your own hands, using 
a yellow cloak to throw over your rags. 

2. Eat the simplest of food, owning nothing save 
what you may receive in your wooden bowl by asking 
alms from door to door. . 

3. Partake of only one meal a day and that before 
noon. 

4. Live in the forests for a part of each year, and 
under no shelter but the shadow of a tree, sitting on 
your carpet even during sleep; to lie down is forbidden. . 

5. You may enter neighboring villages to beg for 
food, but you must return to your forests before night- 
fall. 


EssENTIAL VIRTUES 


The duties of man as a peacemaker are strictly en- 
joined; the duty of humility, the duty of hospitality to 
strangers. 'The essential virtues demanded of each, 
which will conduct to Nirvana, are, however, alms- 
giving or charity, purity, patience, courage, contempla- 


1Max Miiller, Chips from a German Workshop, vol. I. p. 244. 
See also James F’. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, p. 156. 


EssENTIAL VIRTUES 59 


tion, knowledge; but the greatest of all is charity. 
Says a writer already quoted: * “ Charity or benevolence 
may be said to be the characteristic virtue of Buddhism 
—a charity boundless in its self-abnegation, and ex- 
tending to every sentient being. ‘The benevolent 
actions done by the Buddha himself, in the course of 
his many millions of migrations, were favorite themes 
of his followers. On one occasion, seeing a tigress 
starved and unable to feed her cubs, he hesitated not 
to make his body an oblation to charity, and allowed 
them to devour him. Benevolence to animals, with 
that tendency to exaggerate a right principle so char- 
acteristic of the east, is carried among the Buddhist 
monks to the length of avoiding the destruction of fleas 
and the most noxious vermin which they remove from 
their persons with all tenderness.” (This exaggerated 
benevolence, I may add, would flow naturally from 
their belief in the transmigration of souls whereby 
every animal might prove a possible relative.) But as 
regards the more important elements of human con- 
duct, as Max Miiller again says:? “Every shade of 
vice, hypocrisy, anger, pride, suspicion, greediness, 
gossiping, is guarded against by special precepts. 
Among the virtues recommended we find not only 
reverence of parents, care for children, submission to 
authority, gratitude, moderation in time of prosperity, 
submission in time of trial, equanimity at all times, but 
virtues unknown in any heathen system of morality, 


1 Int. Cyc. vol. III. p. 155. See Max Miller, vol. I. p. 245. 
2 Chips from a German Workshop, vol. I. p. 218. 


60 - Evonution anp RELicion 


such as the duty of forgiving insults and not rewarding 
evil with evil. All virtues, we are told, spring from 
Maitri, and this Maitri can only be translated by 
charity and love.” 


PEACEABLENESS 


There is one more remarkable thing to be. noticed in 
Buddhism besides its spirit of self-abnegation and 
benevolence; and that is its constant appeal to reason. 
Like Christianity, it will have nothing to do with vio- 
lence. It abolished human sacrifice and all other 
offerings of blood, substituting therefor flowers, fruits, 
and incense. Its missionaries overran Asia, preaching 
the new gospel of benevolence to all created beings; 
and how successful they were may be seen in the fact 
that it numbers among its adherents to-day (again like 
the Christian faith), practically one third of the entire 
human race. It did indeed vanish from the home that 
gave it birth, expelled by the contrary genius of the 
Hindu mind, but in Thibet, Nepaul, Ceylon, Burmah, 
Siam, China, and Japan it has flourished for centuries. 
And that it has succeeded in softening men’s manners, 
in raising them from the law of the jungle to the higher 
law of unselfishness, who shall deny ? 


Eaypt 


That the dark religion of Egypt contained this same 
germinal idea of self-sacrifice for the general good, 
seems at first thought impossible. ‘This is because we 
confuse the religion of Egypt with its theology. ‘The 


AnmAL WorsHIP 6], 


latter superstructure has so overlaid the former that 
the foundation is buried well-nigh out of sight. The 
basic idea of Egypt’s religion seems to have been the 
mystery of life and death. We see this in its rich 
symbolism; in its worship of all bodily organization, 
whether manifested in human, animal, or plant life; in 
its doctrine of future existence. Transmigration of 
souls, that most curious and most ancient of all beliefs, 
was with them, not as in Buddhism and Brahmanism, 
a retribution, but a condition of progress — thus 
dimly foreshadowing our modern idea of a constant 
upward evolution. According to Herodotus,’ the 
human soul had to pass through animals of all classes 
before it once again entered the human body. This 
circuit occupied 3000 years. It did not begin, how- 
ever, until the body had decayed; hence if embalming 
could postpone decay for 1000 years, so much would 
be eliminated from the journey through animal life. 
From this idea, as well as from that of the sacredness 
of all bodily organization, arose probably the religious 
duty of preparing their tombs as dwellings for the 
dead for such prolonged periods of time. 


AnrmAL WorsHIP 


The Egyptians also worshiped animals. “All ani- 
mals, wild and tame,” says Herodotus,’ “‘ were ac- 
counted sacred; so that if any one killed these animals 
wilfully, he was put to death.” Wilkinson, however, 


1 Herodotus, I. 123. Clarke’s Ten Great Religions, p. 226, note. 
2 Ibid. Book Il. § 65. Ibid. p. 227. 


62 EvoLuTION AND RELIGION 


has proved this statement incorrect. Out of a list of 
more than a hundred which he enumerates, over one 
half were regarded as sacred, the rest were not; a 
fact which might have been suspected from their fa- 
vorite pastimes of hunting and fishing. 


INFLUENCE ON JUDAISM 


The speculative thought of Egypt seems to have 
profoundly influenced Pythagoras, and through him 
Greece and Rome. That it influenced Moses is far 
more doubtful. Its ritual did indeed include the rite 
of circumcision, the use of figures resembling the — 
Cherubim above the ark, the inner sanctuary or holy 
of holies in the temple. The custom too of offering a 
prayer over a victim’s head, “that if any calamity were 
about to befall the land of Egypt, it might be averted 
on this head,” recalls strongly to mind the Jewish 
scapegoat on whose head the high priest was to lay 
his hands, confessing the national sins and putting 
them upon the head of the goat, so that he might bear 
upon him all their iniquities into a land not inhabited.’ 


INFLUENCE ON CHRISTIANITY 


But the influence of Egyptian thought on Christian 
theology appears to have been more pronounced. Its 
fervid African spirit introduced asceticism which later 
developed into monasticism. 'The Alexandrian schools 
rendered materialistic the Church’s conceptions of God, 
Satan, Angels, Devils, Heaven, Hell, Judgment, and 

1 Clarke’s Ten Great Religions pp. 251, 252. 


CoMMANDMENTS 63 


Resurrection. On the opposite hand, they prevented 
these ideas from disappearing into the thin nebulous 
spiritualism of the East. Says a writer: ' “The African 
spirit, in the fiery words of a Tertullian and an Augus- 
tine, ran into a materialism which, opposed to the 
opposite extreme of idealism, saved to the Church its 
healthy realism.” 


COMMANDMENTS 


However, as I have already remarked, it is not with 
theology but with religion that I am concerned. My 
only reason for obtruding Egypt’s theology into this 
discussion is because it has so colored that of Christen- 
dom that we are apt to exaggerate the importance of 
its theology and overlook the basic idea of its religion. 
Let us put aside, therefore, the subtle but unprofitable 
speculations of theologians, and ask what was the in- 
fluence of this religion on the life of the people. Did 
it in any way urge the supreme importance of sub- 
ordinating self to the general good? In reply, I quote 
from the Ritual of the Dead, wherein the soul of each 
individual man, coming for judgment before the Lords 
of Truth, is thus made to address them: ? 

“T have not afflicted any. 

I have not told falsehoods. 

I have not made the laboring man do more than his 
task. 

I have not been idle. 

I have not murdered. 

1 bid. p. 257. 2 Ibid. p. 220. 


64 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


I have not committed fraud. 

I have not injured the images of the gods. 

I have not taken scraps of the bandages of the dead. 

I have not committed adultery. 

I have not cheated by false weights. 

I have not kept milk from sucklings. 

I have not caught the sacred birds.” 

And then addressing each god by name, the soul is 
made to further declare: 

“T have not been idle. 

I have not boasted. 

I have not stolen. 

I have not counterfeited, nor killed sacred beasts, 
nor blasphemed, nor refused to hear the truth, nor 
despised God in my heart.” 

According to some texts, he is made to still further 
declare: 

“T have loved God. 

I have given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, 
garments to the naked, an asylum to the abandoned.” 


INSCRIPTIONS 


Or, consider the inscriptions on their tombs, no mean 
source of interpreting a long-forgotten people’s reli- 
gion: * 

“He loved his father, he honored his mother, he 
loved his brethren, and never went from his house in 
bad temper. He never preferred the great man to 
the low one.” 

1 Clarke’s Ten Great Religions, p. 221. 


INSCRIPTIONS 65 


Or again, equally from an inscription in Upper 
Egypt: 

“T was a wise man, my soul loved God. I was a 
brother to the great men and a father to the humble 
ones, and never was a mischief-maker.” 

Or again, from a priest’s tomb in Sais: 

“TY honored my father, I esteemed my mother, I 
loved my brethren, I found graves for the unburied 
dead. I instructed little children. I took care of 
orphans as though they were my own children. For 
great misfortunes were upon Egypt in my time, and on 
this city of Sais.” 

Or again, from the tomb of a prince at Ben-Hassan: 

“What I have done I will say. My goodness and 
my kindness were ample. I never oppressed the father- 
less, nor the widow. I did not treat cruelly the fisher- 
men, the shepherds, or the poor laborers. ‘There was 
nowhere in my time hunger or want. For I cultivated 
all my fields, far and near, in order that their inhabi- 
tants might have food. I never preferred the great 
and powerful to the humble and poor, but did equal 
justice to all.” 

Or lastly, from a King’s tomb at Thebes: 

“T lived in truth, and fed my soul with justice. What 
I did to men was done in peace, and how I loved God, 
God and my heart well know. I have given bread to 
the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, 
and a shelter to the strangers. I honored the gods with 
sacrifices and the dead with offerings.” 

Is it strange that among a people whose religion 


66 EvoLuTion AND RELIGION 


inculeated such practical morality as the foregoing, 
we should find the profound saying recorded in a papy- 
rus which is the oldest in the world, written 4,000 years 
ago, and preserved in the library of Paris to-day, “The 
bad man’s life is what the wise know to be death” ? + 
Egypt’s idea of what constituted the general good may 
have indeed been limited by the narrow confines of 
country. It was a national religion and hence perished 
with the nation. But that it insisted upon the absolute, 
the religious necessity of subordinating self-love to the 
good of others in the nation at least, seems to me un- 
doubted. 


CHINA 


How is it now with that oldest existing and strangest 
of all civilizations —the sphinx of human history, 
China? Here are a people who have seen Assyria, 
Persia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, all rise to power 
and decay. Their empire alone has survived. Does 
their religion inculcate also the idea of individual 
self-sacrifice for the general good? In my estimation, 
Confucius taught little else. 


ConFUCIUS 


_His practical mind abstained equally from meta- 
physics and from theology. After meeting Lao-tse, 
the philosophical founder of Taoism, he is reported to 

have frankly confessed his inability to comprehend 
| 1Clarke’s Ten Great Religions, p. 249. 


CoMMANDMENTS 67 


him:* “I know how birds fly, how fishes swim, how 
animals run. ‘The bird may be shot, the fish hooked, 
and the beast snared. But there is the dragon. I 
cannot tell how he mounts in the air, and soars to 
heaven. To-day, I have seen the dragon.” Con- 
fucius took the world and its phenomena as he found 
them, without endeavoring to know whence or how 
came ideas of morality, of duty. The theological 
idea of God does not yet seem to have entered his 
mind in connection with religious duty, though the 
moral idea does. It was sufficient for him that men 
had a sense of right and wrong. The practical thing 
was to induce them to follow the right. 


COMMANDMENTS 


And what were the duties which he inculcated? Let 
him speak for himself. Says Confucius: ? 

“T teach you nothing but what you might learn 
yourselves, viz., the observance of the three funda- 
mental laws of relation between sovereign and subject, 
father and child, husband and wife; and the five capital 
virtues: 

1. Universal charity. 

‘Impartial justice. 
Conformity to ceremonies and established usages. 
Rectitude of heart and mind. 
Pure sincerity.” 

Thus, the three questions which Confucius urged 
upon his fellow-countrymen as all-important were: 

1 Tbid. p. 51. 2 Int. Cyc. vol. IV. p. 241. 


oe wt 


68 Evo.uTion AND RELIGION 


“1. How shall I best fulfil my obligations to my 
family ? 

2. How shall I do my duty to my neighbor? 

3. How shall I best discharge the duties of a good 


citizen ?” 


CONTRADICTIONS 


True, the Chinese national character appears to be 
full of contradictions. ‘The mere fact that three differ- 
ent religions, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, 
- exist among them, would account for differing standards 
of morals. In so varied and thickly populated a coun- 
try, too, one must expect contradictory evidence from 
different writers on the subject of morality. ‘Thus 
M. Huc says: * “They are destitute of religious feelings 
and beliefs, skeptical and indifferent to everything that 
concerns the moral side of man, their whole lives but 
materialism put in action.” To which Meadows 
replies: “All this is baseless calumny of the higher 
life of a great portion of the human race. These 
charges may be true of the mass of the Chinese, just as 
they are true of the English, French, and Americans; 
but as amongst these there is a large amount of gener- 
osity and right feeling, and also a minority higher in 
nature, actuated by higher motives, aiming at higher 
aims, so also is there amongst the Chinese a similar 
right feeling, and a like minority who live a higher life 
than the people generally.” 


1 Int. Cyc. vol. Ill. p.'787. Huc, Christianity in China. 
2 Ibid. Meadows, The Chinese and their Rebellions. 


GOVERNMENT 69 


GOVERNMENT 


However this may be, whether the teachings of Con- 
fucius have succeeded in leavening the inert mass of 
the people as yet, or are confined in their influence to 
the high-minded minority, there is no doubt as to the 
tendency of the teachings themselves. They em- 
phasize the need of each individual’s subordinating 
his own immediate selfish interests to the general 
welfare. We see this in the Chinese scheme of govern- 
ment, which is not a pure despotism as so often sup- 
posed, but a paternal autocracy founded on moral 
support. ‘The Emperor is not free to do as he chooses. 
He is directly amenable to public opinion. He must 
govern in accordance with custom. ‘The state religion 
being founded on ancestry worship, filial piety being 
the very basis of their social fabric, he must stand for 
conservatism, reverence for the past, peace, order, 
education, the worship of things as they are. Their 
philosophy of government is thus summed up by a 
writer already quoted: * 

“1. That the nation must be governed by moral 
agency in preference to physical force. 

2. That the services of the wisest and ablest men in 
the nation are indispensable to good government, and 
are to be secured by public service competitive exam- 
inations free from any element of unfairness or favor- 
itism. 

3. That the people have the right to depose a sov- 

1 Meadows. 


70 Evo.uutTion AND RELIGION 


ereign, who, either from active wickedness or vicious 
indolence, gives cause to oppression or tyrannical rule.” 


Moray TEACHING 


In the Teachings of the Kings, a work reviewed by 
Confucius, I find the following: * 

“Humility is the solid foundation of all the virtues. 
To acknowledge one’s incapacity is the way to be soon 
prepared to teach others; for from the moment that a 
man is no longer full of himself, nor puffed up with 
empty pride, whatever good he learns in the morning 
he practises before night. 

Heaven penetrates to the bottom of our hearts, like 
light into a dark chamber. We must conform our- 
selves to it, till we are like two instruments of music 
tuned to the same pitch. We must receive its gifts the 
very moment its hand is open to bestow. Our irregular 
passions shut up the door of our souls against God.” 

And from Confucius’ own teaching I take the fol- 
lowing: ? 

“'To rule with equity is like the North Star, which is 
fixed, and all the rest go around it. 

The essence of knowledge is, having it to apply it, 
not having it, to confess your ignorance. 

Formerly, in hearing men, I heard their words, and 
gave them credit for their conduct; now I hear their 
words and observe their conduct. 

The good man is serene, the bad always in fear. 

A good man regards the root; he fixes the root, and 

1Clarke’s Ten Great Religions, p. 57. 2 Ibid. p. 49. 


ZOROASTER 71 


all else flows out of it. ‘The root is filial piety, the fruit 
brotherly love.” 

And according to James Freeman Clarke, all Con- 
fucian philosophy is pervaded by these four principles: * 

“1. That example is omnipotent. 

2. That to secure the safety of the empire, you must 
secure the happiness of the people. 

3. That by solitary persistent thought one may 
penetrate at last to a knowledge of the essence of things. 

4. That the object of all government is to make the 
people virtuous and contented.” 


ZOROASTER 


We come now to the creed of Zoroaster, the religion 
of ancient Persia, the faith in which Cyrus, Darius, 
Xerxes, Artaxerxes, worshiped. Inasmuch as Zo- 
roaster, or Spitama according to his true family name, 
was, roughly speaking, a contemporary of Moses, our 
knowledge of his teaching is but fragmentary, most of 
the sacred scriptures having been lost during the troub- 
lous five centuries that followed the conquest of Persia 
by Alexander. At first a monotheism, his religion 
seems also to have developed into a dualism. Hence 
comes the militant note dominant in this religion, 
calling upon every faithful follower to always do battle 
for the right. 

1 Ibid. p. 53. 


72 EvoLuTIoNnN AND RELIGION 


Sun WorsHIpP 


Herodotus, speaking of the Persian Magi, 450 B.c., 
says: * 

“The Persians have no altars, no temples, nor 
images; they worship on the tops of the mountains. 
They adore the heavens, and sacrifice to the sun, moon, 
earth, fire, water, and winds.” 


Morat.itry 


Enough, however, has been preserved of the ritual 
of this religion to prove that it too was essentially moral. 
Like Buddha, Zoroaster seems to have been a practical 
reformer, likewise leading a revolt against the nebulous 
Pantheism of India. His whole duty of man is summed 
up in three cardinal principles: 

1. Pure thoughts. 

2 ‘True words. 

3. Right actions. 

The substance of his law is, “ Think purely, speak 
purely, act purely.” 

In his liturgy, the very oldest part of the Avesta, he 
says: ? 

“T praise the good men and women of the whole world 
of purity. I desire by my prayer with uplifted hands 
this joy, — the pure works of the Holy Spirit, — Mazda 

. a disposition to perform good actions, . .. and 
pure gifts for both worlds, the bodily and the spiritual. 


1Clarke’s Ten Great Religions, p. 175. Herodotus, I. 131. 
2 [bid. p. 188. 


Mora.ity 73 


I have entrusted my soul to heaven . . . and I will 
teach what is pure so long as I can. 

I keep forever purity and good-mindedness. 

Teach thou me, Ahura-Mazda, out of thyself; from 
heaven, by thy mouth, whereby the world first arose. 

We honor the good spirit, the good kingdom, the 
good law, — all that is good.” 

In the hymn to Mithra, the Persian savior or mediator, 
occur these verses: * 

“JT think in my soul: no earthly man with a hundred- 
fold strength thinks so much evil as Mithra with 
heavenly strength thinks good. 

No earthly man with a hundred-fold strength speaks 
so much evil as Mithra with heavenly strength speaks 
good. 
No earthly man with a hundred-fold strength does 
so much evil as Mithra with heavenly strength does 
good.” 

From one of the Zoroastrian Patets, or formularies 
of confession, I take the following: ? 

“T repent the sins against father, mother, sister, 
brother, wife, child, against spouses, against superiors, 
against my own relations, against those living with me, 
against those who possess equal property, against 
neighbors, against the inhabitants of the same town, 
against servants, every unrighteousness through which 
I have been amongst sinners, — of these sins repent I 
with thoughts, words, and works, corporeal as spiritual, 
earthly as heavenly, with the three words: pardon, O 

1 Ibid. p. 191. 2 Ibid. pp. 192, 193. 


74 EvoLuTion AND RELIGION 


Lord, I repent of sins. Of pride, haughtiness, covet- 
ousness, slandering the dead, anger, envy, the evil eye, 
shamelessness, looking at with evil intent, looking at 
with evil concupiscence, stiff-neckedness, discontent 
with the godly arrangements, self-willedness, sloth, 
despising others, mixing in strange matters, unbelief, 
opposing the divine powers, false witness, false judg- 
ment, idol-worship, running naked, running with one 
shoe, the breaking of the midday prayer, the omission 
of the midday prayer, theft, robbery, whoredom, witch- 
craft, worshiping with sorcerers, unchastity, tearing 
the hair, as well as all other kinds of sin, enumerated 
or not enumerated, which I am aware of or not aware 
of, which are appointed or not appointed, which I 
should have bewailed with obedience before the Lord, 
and have not bewailed, — of these sins repent I with 
thoughts, words, and works, corporeal as _ spiritual, 
earthly as heavenly, O Lord, pardon,. I repent with 
the three words, with Patet.” | 


PARSEES 


And as a final proof of the fact that Zoroaster’s re- 
ligion taught pre-eminently the duty of preferring the 
general good to self, let me point to the modern Parsees 
of India, a small sect directly descended from his 
ancient followers who were driven from Persia by 
Mohammedan persecutions. ‘Though few in numbers 
their influence has been great, simply because they 
have practised as their chief religious tenet the pri- 
mordial virtues of benevolence, charity, and generosity. 


GREECE 75 


GREECE 


Over the more modern or better-known religions of 
Greece, Rome, Scandinavia, Judaism, and Moham- 
medanism, you would hardly expect that I should 
linger long. In each the same dominant note is found, 
z.¢., the duty of subordinating self to the general wel- 
fare. As I have intimated before, this duty was often 
circumscribed by the limited scope given to the idea of 
what constituted the general. Thus, morality in Greek 
religion seldom rose above the idea of patriotism, but 
that they worshiped with unsurpassed fervor. Their 
prophets were their poets. ‘The works of Homer who 
sang of war, of Hesiod the peasant-poet who sang of 
home and peace, commerce and politics, of the lyric 
poets, Callinus and Tyrtzeus, were their earliest Bible; 
all of them poets who made a religion of patriotism. 
In the works or utterances of many of the Greek phi- 
losophers we do indeed catch sight of the higher truth. 
Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, and possibly others, all 
had the larger vision in smaller or greater measure; 
and during the first Christian centuries, when Stoicism 
predominated in Greek intellectual theories, “ philos- 
ophers of all schools, poets, historians, and rhetoricians, 
spoke like Seneca and Epictetus of the sacred love of 
the world, of the equality of man, of universal law and 
a universal republic.” * 


1 Am. Cyc. vol./XI. p. 810. 


76 EvoLurioNn AND RELIGION 


RoME 


In Rome again, virtue did not often extend beyond 
the idea of duty owed to other members of the state. 
Thus it was not lawful to scourge publicly and un- 
condemned a Roman citizen; but in the case of an 
outsider it mattered little, he had small chance of re- 
dress. Under the tenth table of Roman law, nothing 
short of the general legislature could condemn a Roman 
citizen to death, but the tables extended no such safe- 
guard over the lives of foreigners. And yet, the great 
gift which Rome gave to the world was Law, founded 
on the theory that “man is born for justice.” For 
while the Greeks went further in political speculation, 
the Romans worked out the practical rights of citizens. 
As regards the state, however, the sense of the duty of 
subordinating self to the general good was something 
marvelous. Says a writer, speaking of the ancient 
Roman religion: * “A code of moral and ethical rules, 
furthering and preserving civil order, and the pious — 
relations within the state and family, were the palpable 
results of this religion.” Says another writer, already 
quoted,’ “Never was such esprit de corps developed, 
never such intense patriotism, never such absolute 
subservience and sacrifice of the individual to the 
community.” r 


1 Int. Cyc. vol. XII. p. 722. 
2Clarke’s Ten Great Religions, p. 339. 


SCANDINAVIA 77 


SCANDINAVIA 


In the religion of our Scandinavian forefathers, man’s 
chief virtue consisted in courage; the unpardonable sin 
was cowardice,’ — again a standard of morality which 
indeed called for the sacrifice of the individual to the 
general good, but which limited the idea of the general 
to the nation. 


MoHAMMEDANISM 


The ardor of Mohammed’s followers, who were 
punctilious enough in the needful observance of the 
moral duties of their religious creed toward one another, 
was too often marred by an excessive sectarian loyalty. 
It degenerated, through an imperfect religious ideal, 
into frightful excesses of cruelty towards unbelieving 
outsiders who refused to accept their faith. 


JUDAISM 


Jewish morality, again, too often stopped short at 
the confines of the nation. And yet, in this religion 
again we catch occasional glimpses of the higher 
truth that the general ought to include the race; that a 
man’s duties to his fellow are not circumscribed by the 
narrow confines of family, village, city, tribe, or nation, 
but should extend to all mankind. Says a writer: ? 

“The prophets of the Jews, whatever else we deny 
to their predictions, certainly foresaw Christianity. 
They describe the coming of a time in which the law 

1 Ibid. p. 363. 2 Ibid. p. 448. 


78 Evo.LutTion AND RELIGION 


should be written in the heart, of a king who should 
reign in righteousness, of a prince of peace, of one who 
should rule by the power of truth, not by force, whose 
kingdom should be universal and everlasting, and into 
which all nations of the earth should flow. What the 
prophets foresaw was not times or seasons, nor dates 
nor names, not any minute particulars. But they saw 
a future age, they lived out of their own time in another 
time, which had not yet arrived. They left behind 
them Jewish ceremonialism, and entered into a moral 
and spiritual religion. ‘They dropped Jewish narrow- 
ness and called all mankind brethren. In this they 
reach the highest form of foresight, which is not simply 
to predict a coming event, but to live in the spirit of a 
future time. Thus the prophets developed the Jewish 
religion to its highest point. The simple, childlike 
faith of Abraham became, in their higher vision, the 
sight of a universal Father, and of an age in which all 
men and nations should be united into one great moral 
kingdom.” 


BEARING ON MANn’s SURVIVAL 


In this survey of the world’s great religions we have 
seen how in all of them the central idea of subordinating 
self to the general, in greater or less degree, has been 
constantly present. It therefore becomes necessary to 
scrutinize more closely this idea in its bearing on man’s 
survival in the struggle for existence. How may it be 
said to favor the survival of the family, of the tribe, of 


BEARING ON MAN’s SURVIVAL 79 


the nation, of the race? You will remember how, in 
the process of evolution, man’s struggle for existence 
became enlarged from one between individuals to a 
struggle between communities, or aggregates of indi- 
viduals. If, now, man finds that the general well-being 
of the community, and the satisfaction of each individual 
unit with the basic justice of the conditions of his lot in 
life, aid in this struggle of communities against each 
other, the principle of selection will naturally seize upon 
any idea which fosters such general well-being, and 
develop it. And what idea can foster such well-being 
more than the intelligent idea that it is our sacred duty 
to subordinate the interests of self to those of the 
general? ‘This is the spirit of the true soldier of the 
commonwealth, the spirit of subordination. It is 
small wonder that man should be impelled to make a 
moral idea out of it, that he should even be compelled 
to deify it. The idea is absolutely necessary to the 
continued existence of his race, once he has been forced 
into community life, or even into family life. And 
that the general well-being of these aggregates of in- 
dividuals tends to aid in the struggle for existence 
between communities, I need only point for proof to 
those nations of the modern world, as contrasted with 
other nations where so wide-spread a well-being is not 
the ideal, or at least has not yet been attained. This, 
it seems to me, is the philosophy of our entire modern 
civilization. It is the basis of our great attempted 
liberal forward movement. It is the true meaning of 
the experiment of democracy. It is the purpose of 


80 Evo.utTion AND RELIGION 


our laws and our religion. For in the well-being of the 
general mass of the people, in their satisfaction with 
the justice of the conditions of their lot in life, in their 
opportunities for self-advancement and _ self-develop- 
ment, seem to be found the factors which count most 
powerfully in this competitive race between nations. 


OxssecTION: Wuy RacEr? 


But, you may ask, Why should I subordinate self to 
the good of the race? What is the race to me? I can 
understand the necessity of subordinating self to family 
or country, in order that they may win in the struggle 
for existence; but I am not aware of any such compelling 
love to the race. In reply, let me ask, Why should you 
subordinate self to the good of your family, of your 
nation? You will answer, truly, that it is because you 
love your family, because you love your nation, and 
wish to see them successful in the struggle for existence. 
Precisely; and why do you love your family and your 
nation? Is it not, in its ultimate analysis, because you 
feel that they are of one blood with you? If then you 
can be brought to believe (not through mere outward 
lip-service, but in your heart of hearts, honestly, sin- 
cerely), that the entire human race is of one blood with 
you, will not that same love and sympathy which you 
give so freely to family and nation extend so as to em- 
brace all mankind? Will you not desire to see the race 
equally successful in its struggle for existence? Not 
indeed until you fully realize that we are all members 
of one family, of one tribe, of one race of human beings, 


Law oF MortTa.ity 81 


will your love develop sufficiently to enable you to 
subordinate self to the race. But that way lies the 
ideal; that way lies perfection. 


Law or Morta.iry 


We are all, high and low, rich and poor, wise and 
foolish, prince and pauper, nobleman and commoner, 
Caucasian and Ethiopian, Malay and Mongolian, pas- 
sengers on one boat, bound to one port. The same 
planet carries us, the same fate awaits us. Some may 
travel first-class, some second, some steerage; but the 
dangers which confront us are the same, our destina- 
tion is the same. We are all living under one inexor- 
able law of life and death. Sometimes, when a great 
cataclysm overwhelms many of our race at one stroke, 
we feel the truth of this oneness of race through this 
inexorable law of life and death. The imaginations 
of those of us who survive are impressed by the dramatic 
quality of the blow. But the law of mortality is ever 
the same. Whether it come in the form of earthquake, 
thunderstorm, pestilence, famine, conflagration, vol- 
canic outburst, intense cold, fierce heat, wild beast, or 
in the more humble and usual form of disease, accident, 
or simply man’s inhumanity to man, death comes to 
all alike. To ward off these enemies for all time from 
the individual, is not possible. The survival of the 
individual unit is impossible. But we can, as a race, 
present a united front to all these enemies of mankind 
alike, realizing that thus only can the perfection of our 
race be secured. We surely do not want, however, to 


82 EvoLuTIoN AND RELIGION 


waste our strength, energy, and ammunition, firing 
into the ranks of each other, simply because some 
regiments in the army of our common race happen to 
wear a different uniform from our own. ‘The race has 
all that it can do to fight and overcome life’s natural 
enemies without adding to their number artificial 
enemies of its own making, through a lack of sense of 
our common humanity. 


PATRIOTISM 


I have often wondered, if some brave Babylonish or 
Egyptian youth who sacrificed his life for those dead 
empires in their heyday of strength three or four thou- 
sand years ago could miraculously be brought back to 
life to-day, whether he would consider that the game 
had been worth the candle. His empires have long 
since vanished from the earth; his people are scattered 
never to be reunited. What is there to show for the 
heroic sacrifice which he made of his brave young 
life? Apparently, absolutely nothing. And yet, did 
such a thought as this deter our own brave American 
youth both North and South when the great Civil War 
issued its dread summons? Will it indeed ever deter 
brave, self-sacrificing idealists, at least until they have 
grown beyond the more limited horizon of mental sym- 
pathy known as patriotism? Not until that horizon 
widens, you may be sure, will their idea of morality 
change in this respect, or rather, become enlarged so 
as to entertain the wider, more profound ideal of race 
loyalty. 


So-CaLLED Races 83 


So-CatLtEp Races 


There are symptoms to-day that this horizon is be- 
coming enlarged. For instance, a favorite doctrine of 
old international law was that a subject could not cast 
off his allegiance to the land of his birth without the 
consent of his sovereign. ‘The United States, one of 
the youngest in the family of nations, has always in- 
sisted on expatriation as a fundamental right of man. 
It is an exclusively American doctrine, but we would 
seem to be succeeding measurably in our novel conten- 
tion. I think it will hardly be questioned that patriotic 
sentiment is steadily, not declining, but being overlaid 
by a wider race sentiment. Men have a vague sort of 
idea that it is somehow too narrow for the field of human 
sympathy that a mere accident of birth in a certain 
locality should be allowed to circumscribe their feelings 
of humanity. To go forth and shoot fellow human 
beings for no other reason than that they happen to 
belong to a nation at war with one’s own nation — a 
war in all probability brought on through the folly or 
venality of ruling powers — becomes increasingly dis- 
tasteful and repulsive to thinking men as their horizon 
of sympathy widens. The danger now is lest we con- 
tent ourselves with but a single step in advance and 
stop short at a so-called “race” loyalty. Recent 
events, particularly the war in the East, have opened 
men’s eyes to the apparently impending struggle in the 
marts of trade between the so-called yellow and white 
races. To what lengths the coming strife for the 


84 EvoLutTIoNn AND RELIGION 


markets of the world will lead, no one can safely say. 
Thinkers who have noted the marvelous tenacity of 
life displayed by the so-called yellow race under the 
most unfavorable climatic conditions, have come to 
the improbable though perhaps not unnatural con- 
clusion that the future belongs to them. Their ca- 
pacity for work, their enormous numbers, their ability 
to live on the simplest of food and consequently for 
wages which would mean starvation to any other race, 
their adaptive genius for making use of the inventions 
of their Western brethren, whether warlike or indus- 
trial, certainly seem to render them formidable an- 
tagonists and competitors for the future. The feeling 
between the black and the white races, also, is already 
notorious and deep-rooted. It crops out in many lands 
to-day where the two races come into contact; in Cen- 
tral Africa, in South Africa, with the Belgians, English, 
Germans, and Portuguese. Who that read of the 
many ambushes of the white race by the yellow during 
the recent war between Russia and Japan, when the 
whites with still whiter faces ran wildly hither and 
thither seeking cover, could fail to recall to mind 
similar wholesale slaughters of blacks by whites in the — 
Dark Continent? There was apparently the same cold- 
blooded rounding up of the quarry as so much game, 
the same cynical, heartless indifference, the same racial 
contempt and forgetfulness of the fact of human kinship. 
In our own country, the feeling between the blacks and 
the whites shows itself in abominable crimes, in un- 
speakable offenses on the one hand, in savage out- 


One Race 85 


bursts of fierce retaliatory passion on the other. Our 
relations, too, with the so-called brown race in our 
island possessions can hardly be termed cordial. ‘Those 
of the French with the similar or related race in Mada- 
gascar do not seem to be much better. Nay, more, 
this feeling of antagonism is not even confined to the 
larger divisions of mankind, the so-called white, yellow, 
black, or brown races. You may see it in the prejudice 
between the so-called Slav, Latin, Teutonic, and Anglo- 
Saxon races, absurd as it seems to speak of these varying 
nationalities as races. You may see it in the wide- 
spread feeling against the so-called Semitic race. 


One Race 


And yet, as a matter of scientific fact, these racial 
distinctions would appear to be largely fictitious. 
In support of this assertion, I invite any one to tell 
me the exact number of races, so called, which exist in 
the world to-day. Some naturalists in the past would 
have answered sixty-three, sixty, twenty-two, sixteen, 
fifteen, eleven, eight, seven, six, five. To-day some 
will answer four, three, even two; the number being 
steadily narrowed as man’s knowledge of himself in- 
creases.'_ Some will attempt to distinguish them by 
the color of their skin. Others, deeming this unscien- 
tific, will attempt to distinguish them by the length or 
shortness of their skulls; others, by their facial angle. 
Still others again, rejecting all these methods as un- 
trustworthy, will attempt to distinguish them by the 

1 Darwin, Descent of Man, vol. I. p. 218. 


86 Evo.LutTion AND RELIGION 


character of their hair; when, as a matter of fact, there 
seems to be no safe criterion, no clearly defined dividing 
line. All the so-called races, even the highest with 
the lowest, can interbreed and yet their offspring is 
fertile; something we should hardly expect if the parents 
were of different species. Says a recent writer on 
anthropology: * “The drift of the evolutionary theory 
is towards unity of origin. Darwin says, “When 
naturalists observe a close agreement in numerous 
small habits, tastes and dispositions, between two or 
more domestic races, or between nearly allied forms, 
they use the fact as an argument that all are descended 
from a common progenitor, who was thus endowed; 
and consequently that all should be classed under the 
same species. The same argument may be applied 
with much force to the races of men.’? The experience 
of the last few years countenances Mr. Darwin’s 
prophecy, that before long the dispute between those 
who hold that all men come from one pair and those 
who hold to diverse originals, will die a silent and un- 
noticed death.” 


Race Love 


The belief to which Darwin apparently inclined 
seems to be becoming tacitly accepted more and more. 
The term “races” is a convenience, but it hardly ex- 
presses a scientific fact. Essential race unity as one 
great human family, appears to approach more closely 
to the strictly scientific statement which will satisfy 

1 Int. Cyc. vol. I. p. 514. 2 Descent of Man, vol. I. p. 225. 


Race Love 87 


all the facts of the case. But the evolutionary ideals 
of at least three of the great world-religions would seem 
to have forestalled by from two to three thousand years 
this latest discovery of science. In other words, man’s 
emotional intuitions in this all-important question 
appear to have been just three cycles ahead of his in- 
tellectual perceptions. The prophets of Israel, Gau- 
tama, and Jesus were the first of all the sons of men to 
look beyond the narrower horizon of national and so- 
called race prejudice (at a period, too, in the world’s 
history when man’s reason regarded almost every 
separate nationality, tribe, people, caste, or even in- 
habitants of a city, as constituting a separate race), and 
catch a glimpse of the larger vision of the essential unity 
of mankind. All through the intervening ages since 
they taught, whilst man has been blindly groping his 
intellectual way upwards, now basing his moral ideas 
on the inherent antagonism between survival of self 
and survival of family, survival of tribe, survival of 
town, survival of nation, survival of so-called races, 
they have held steadily forth before the view of man- 
kind their ideal of race unity. This ideal of itself 
rendered not only violence and war, but murder, 
adultery, fraud, revenge, hatred, envy, and selfishness, 
sins which militated against race survival. ‘The only 
principle that will drive out these primordial passions 
of the human heart appears to be family love. Love 
does it already, more or less imperfectly, in our present 
family life. Love does it already, more or less imper- 
fectly, in our national life. Love will do it, more or 


88 EvoLuTion AND RELIGION 


less imperfectly at first, in our race life. But as love 
grows, so will these purely selfish passions die which 
militate against man’s general well-being; so will be 
substituted in their place a love as wide and boundless 
as the universe, knowing no separate castes or creeds, 
no divided nationalities, no differing races, but em- 
bracing all mankind; a sympathy for and with all men, 
and the acts which naturally flow from such an honest 
sympathy. Had the mental horizon of the peoples to 
whom this ideal was addressed widened sufficiently yet 
to enable them to entertain so enlarged and profound 
a moral idea? Not in the least. But the evolutionary 
ideal was set before the race, and some day the race, 
somewhere, somehow, would slowly grow up to it in a 


people which should bring forth the fruits thereof. 


Love WirHout REASON 


But you must always apparently be on your guard 
against one danger. It is just as-easy to exaggerate 
unduly the emotional side of man’s nature as it is the 
intellectual side; easier, perhaps. In this wider view 
of the race as one great human family, we must equally 
guard against the evils which an exaggerated love, 
untempered by reason, produces in our present family 
life. In other words, love must always be guided by 
intelligence. Listen to the following suggestive pas- 
sage taken from a writer on the family life in Africa 
to-day, and tell me whether the phenomenon is con- 
fined to the Dark Continent alone. “In most tribes 

1 Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa, p. 156. 


Tue GoLpDEN MEAN 89 


of the Bantu the unit in the constitution of the com- 
munity is the family, not the individual. However 
successful a man may be in trade, hunting, or any other 
means of gaining wealth, he cannot, even if he would, 
keep it all to himself. He must share with the family, 
whose indolent members thus are supported by the 
more energetic or industrious. I often urged my civi- 
lized employees not to spend so promptly, almost on 
pay-day itself, their wages in the purchase of things 
they really did not need. I represented that they 
should lay by ‘for a rainy day.’ But they said that if 
it was known that they had money laid up, their rela- 
tions would give them no peace until they had com- 
pelled them to draw it and divide it with them. ‘They 
all yielded to this, — the strong, the intelligent, the 
diligent, submitting to their family, though they knew 
that their hard-earned pay was going to support weak- 
ness, heathenism, and thriftlessness.”’ 


Ture GoLpEN MEAN 


We have the same indolent members both in our 
family life and in the larger world community to-day, 
those who would like to be supported by the more 
energetic and industrious. Man’s instinct of gener- 
osity as well as man’s needs, are diligently exploited 
by the spoilers of the race. It would seem to be a 
strict middle course that we must steer in dealing with ~ 
this fundamental, but intricate, delicate problem. For 
man’s head impels him to selfishness; man’s heart 
urges him toward generosity; either quality may be 


90 EvoLuTrion AND RELIGION 


easily exaggerated. As usual, the golden mean appears 
to lie between. In the evolutionary ideal of the right 
use of property, for instance (one of the fundamental 
bases of all human progress), the theories of a Robert 
Owen or an Edward Bellamy, who allow the emotional 
side of their nature to get the upper hand of them, 
seem to err on the side of undue emotionalism quite as 
profoundly as the theories of a Ricardo or a John 
Stuart Mill, who exaggerate the intellectual side of 
their nature, err on the side of over-intellectualism. 
Remember that man is complex. One-sided theories 
will not settle the question. It is a biological problem; 
and the biological conditions of life, the evolutionary 
struggle between the two ideas, survival of race and 
survival of self, appear to be the only thing that can 
satisfactorily settle it. The middle line of conduct, 
which shall produce race perfection or the development 
of the highest type of man, is apparently the only safe 
line to follow; and that will be found, I think, in giving 
free play to intelligence tempered by emotion; in other 
words, to individual self-interest controlled by the 
ever-growing restraint imposed on the individual 
through this ideal of an enlarged family affection for 
the race. 


Law 


There are those to-day who apparently believe only 

in salvation by law. This is our modern pet heresy. 
But law, I think you will find, where it touches the 
subject of man’s conduct, is only man’s ideals crystal- 


Law 91 


lized more or less imperfectly into concrete form. It is 
what we call applied justice. Unless, therefore, those 
ideals have become accepted by a decisive majority in 
a given community, the laws which attempt to crystal- 
lize them prematurely will be of worse than no effect. 
They will remain a dead letter. They will not be 
enforced. And this will ultimately exert a deadening 
influence on public sentiment, accustoming it, as it 
does, to seeing the law broken with impunity. Ac- 
cordingly it seems hardly wise to attempt by law to 
force an ideal upon a community before its time. 
Probably one of the hardest things in life for generous- 
minded spirits ‘who have caught the vision of a higher 
ideal, is to possess their souls in patience until their 
ideal has come to be generally accepted. And yet 
there would seem to be no salvation in law per se. 
Salvation apparently cannot come from without; it 
must come from within. Ideals must by the very 
nature of the case precede the law, which is only erys- 
tallized ideals. Thus, Christianity is said to have abol- 
ished slavery among the nations of Christendom; but 
the ideal of man’s equality in the sight of God, and. 
hence before the law, had to come first and be gener- 
ally accepted, before it could become crystallized suc- 
cessfully into human law. In like manner, we have 
already in our law to-day the crystallized ideal that 
no one shall use his property so as to injure another; 
and that the social organism is justified in thus pro- 
tecting itself against the abuse of private property 
rights, goes without saying. But this, like Confucius’ 


92 Evo.LuTion AND RELIGION 


rendering of the golden rule, is after all only the nega- 
tive side of man’s ideal of right conduct as regards the 
use of property. When you come, however, to the 
positive side of the ideal, -viz., that a man shall use 
his property for the benefit of others as well, then it 
seems to me that you are, in the present day at least, 
traveling out of the domain of law into what is as yet 
only the realm of ideals, and not a generally accepted 
ideal at that. In homely English, you would be trying 
to put the cart before the horse, to establish the law 
before the ideal had become generally accepted among 
men. Law, by the very nature of it, must deal mainly 
with the negative side of the ideal, the “’Thou shalt 
nots” of human conduct. As commonly expressed, 
you cannot by legislation make a people moral. The 
best that you can do, by law, is apparently to prevent 
men from too flagrantly sinning against the crystallized 
ideals of their race. But when you would have law 
invade the positive side of the ideal as well, the “Thou 
shalts” of human conduct, then it seems to me that you 
are treading on very delicate ground. For how is it 
with the family life to-day, of which human society 
under our new thought is to become only an enlarge- 
ment? Can a father forcibly impose upon any one 
of his sons, who, through native ability, foresight, 
shrewdness or self-denial, happens to be better off 
than the rest of his brothers, the duty of devoting his 
property, as clothed with a family interest, to the gen- 
eral family use? Not in the least. The regulation 
of such matters is left, and left wisely in my opinion, 


Law 93 


either to the principle of competition or to the ideal 
of family love. Even Roman law — in which paternal 
power over children seems to have been well-nigh abso- 
lute; in some of whose modern descendants, on the other 
hand, a father is forbidden to absolutely disinherit a 
wayward, degenerate child; which looked at property 
in land as coming from the state, as opposed to our 
feudal idea that the owner of land is the conqueror of 
the land, and hence holds the rights of a conqueror 
—even Roman law would hardly go so far as to 
attempt to enforce the positive side of the ideal; far 
less our Anglo-Saxon law with its broader spirit of 
liberty, its tendency to refrain from all unwarrantable 
interference with the rights of the individual. Let 
us beware lest we are led into the fatal mistake of 
attempting to demand from individual members of the 
state a higher standard of community morality than we 
are willing to live up to ourselves as individual mem- 
bers of the family. The ideal of love must prevail 
equally on both sides, the community’s, the majority’s 
side, as well as the individual’s side. Mob tyranny is 
not one whit better than individual tyranny; if anything, 
it is worse. Extend the ideal of the family standard as 
far as you please until you have included the entire 
race. But do not try too soon to raise that standard to 
an impossible height, by law, before the ideal has first 
preceded it and become generally accepted. Other- 
wise, I cannot help thinking that by using force pre- 
maturely, you will only succeed in arousing men’s 
antagonism to the ideal, and so defeat your own ends. 


94 EvoLuTIon AND RELIGION 


VIOLENCE 


There are those on the other hand to-day who 
would bring about the reign of equity on earth by 
violence. Foolish attempt. So long as men will to 
live under the law of the jungle, the strong must pre- 
vail, over the weak. ‘The clever, the crafty, the un- 
scrupulous will continue to exploit and prey upon the 
slow-witted, the single-minded, the honest. Violence, 
apparently, can never cure these evils. Attempts to 
wrest away superfluous wealth by violent means will, 
as in the case of law, only rouse men’s latent antagonism, 
and make them all the harsher in their use and abuse 
of wealth. Men are born with unequal talents. There 
is no use evading the fact. It is patent to any one who 
will open his eyes and look about him. When our 
Declaration of Independence asserts that all men are 
created equal, it refers to the equality of every human 
being before the law, equality of political and civil 
rights. Even in this restricted meaning of equality 
it expressed an ideal rather than a fact, seeing that the 
document was penned by a slave-holder. But it cer- 
tainly never meant that men are born with equal 
talents. The clever will always rule in the end. This 
is what would seem to explain in part the failures of 
the long line of communistic and socialistic communi- 
ties which have endeavored to realize the ideal of equal 
opportunity, of a commonwealth; inasmuch as com- 
munism, by the very nature of it, cannot outlast more 
than one or two generations of mankind because (unless 


SELECTION 95 


the principle of selection seizes upon it because it finds 
that it aids in the struggle for existence), there is nothing 
to insure its acceptance by the oncoming generations. 
In the long run it runs up against human nature, 
i.e., the basic passion of covetousness, which proves too 
strong for its fine-spun theories of equal rights. Not 
until a change is made in the ideals of the individual 
men who go to make up a community can you look 
for even the remote possibility of success in realizing 
man’s evolutionary ideal of justice. It would seem to 
be Aisop’s fable of the wind, the sun, and the traveler, 
over again. The blustering wind of violence cannot 
induce the traveler to remove his cloak. He will only 
button it up the more closely about him. But the sun 
of love, genial in its warmth and kindliness, will con- 
strain him of itself to lay aside his cloak as something 
superfluous and excessive, as something which he 
really does not need. 


SELECTION 


But, it may be finally objected, What is to become of 
the principle of selection once this ideal of a common 
humanity is attained? If the law of universal love, 
guided by reason, is to prevail, what will become of the 
struggle for existence which seems indispensable to 
produce the best and highest type of race perfection ? 
You need never fear, even when man has attained his 
highest ideal, that he will ever escape from the law of 
the struggle for existence. Most of man’s enemies will 
apparently always be with him. Advancing knowledge 


96 Evo.LutTion AND RELIGION 


may indeed mitigate the power of some of them, for as 
man’s ignorance of the phenomena of life diminishes 
so his control over these natural enemies increases. 
The wild beasts to-day are practically vanquished, out- 
side of the tropics and the polar regions. Disease 
germs are being attacked more successfully day by day. 
Famines are growing rarer through scientific investi- 
gation of obscure blights on crops, and through in- 
creased transportation. Suffering from fierce heats 
can be relieved somewhat by growing facilities for 
escaping temporarily at least from the plague spots 
and pest holes of city life; intense cold can be alle- 
viated by the use of newly discovered fuels and im- 
proved methods of heating. ‘Thunderstorms, floods, 
too, can be guarded against in a measure. Even con- 
flagrations may be avoided or mitigated, in some cases, 
through watchfulness and better facilities for controlling 
or fighting fire. But the struggle to overcome life’s 
enemies will, apparently, never wholly pass away as 
long as the evolutionary conditions of man’s life remain 
unchanged. ‘The main thing for our race to do would 
seem to be to present a united front to all these enemies 
of life alike — not forgetting to extirpate the traitors 
in its own ranks, the wild beasts of selfish passion in 
man’s own heart, which by preying on the needs or 
weaknesses of his fellowman render it more difficult to 
overcome the natural enemies of life. 


INTELLECTUAL KNOWLEDGE 97 


INTELLECTUAL KNOWLEDGE 


There are many to-day who regard intellectual 
ignorance as the sole enemy of mankind. Educate the 
people, they say, to an increased perception of the true 
meaning of the physical phenomena of life, and all will 
be well. These would appear to be persons of only 
one idea. That man’s control over the physical 
enemies of his life has increased, as advance in intel- 
lectual knowledge has lessened his fears of the unknown, 
goes without saying. But man has to deal with more 
than physical enemies alone. The most powerful and 
insidious enemies of his life are yet before him to be 
met, combated, and overcome. Intellectual educa- 
tion alone will not overcome them. On the contrary, 
intellectual education by itself, without some restrain- 
ing influence that shall really restrain, only goes to 
render these enemies more formidable to the general 
well-being. The advance in physical knowledge to-day 
with its discoveries of exciting stimulants, powerful 
drugs, and high explosives, puts it in the power of 
educated demons to work havoc amongst large num- 
bers of their fellowmen. Unless some adequate moral 
and self-restraining influence be found, society will 
find itself ultimately compelled to exterminate these 
assailers of the social organism. The true enemies of 
the future to be overcome, therefore, are not alone the 
physical enemies of life, not alone intellectual ignorance, 
but the selfish passions in each individual man’s heart, 
enemies like anger, lust, lying, revenge, hatred, envy, 


98 EyoLuTion AND RELIGION 


and covetousness. ‘They are not physical or intellec- 
tual enemies, but moral and spiritual enemies. They 
have to be overcome by moral and spiritual means. 
All the knowledge in the world concerning the physical 
phenomena of life will not serve to expel them. On 
the contrary, that knowledge, as I have said, often 
serves only to render them so much the more dangerous 
to the general well-being that the social organism is. 
ultimately obliged to assist Nature in wiping out their 
slaves or devotees as degenerate, pernicious forms of 
lower life. 


CHRISTIANITY 


We come, therefore, to the teaching of Christianity in 
its bearing on this central idea of the supreme need of 
subordinating self to the general welfare, and must 
endeavor to approach it in the same catholic spirit with 
which we have endeavored to examine the other great 
world-religions. Dwelling on the shortcomings of 
the followers of all religions in attaining the ideal set 
before them, teaches nothing. The battle between 
self and altruism is a never-ending one, both in the life 
of the individual and in the life of the race. It has to 
be renewed in each successive oncoming generation. 
The great school of Self ever has its self-interested 
advocates, powerful and ready to speak in behalf of 
the narrower standard of morality. But the supreme 
point in every religion is its ideal. If the followers of 
the ancient Jewish prophets, if the followers of Gau- 


Tue GoOsPEL 99 


tama, or those of Jesus, have fallen short of the world- 
wide charity and love which those Teachers preached; 
if they have been guilty of theological narrowness, 
sectarian persecution, national prejudice, — these sins 
must be laid to the shortcomings of self in its struggle 
with the altruistic principle, or to a fault in the method 
of attaining the ideal, or to a failure in providing an 
adequate motive; not to any shortcomings in the ideal 
itself. 


Tue GosPEL 


What then is this gospel of Jesus of which we hear so 
much and yet understand so little? I reply, it is for 
one thing, the highest, broadest ideal yet vouchsafed 
to mankind of the evolutionary idea of survival of race 
as opposed to survival of self, of the supreme need of 
subordinating self-love to race-love, if we would have 
our race attain perfection. Combined with this, it fur- 
nishes a practical method of attaining that ideal, and an 
adequate motive for putting the method into practise. 
It contains within it the germ of fear which we have 
seen in fetichism, but it is fear ennobled by trust. It 
recognizes symbolism too, but symbolism purified of its 
grossness. It has all the purity of Zoroastrianism, the 
spirituality of Brahmanism, the reverence for parents 
and worship of the general well-being and common- 
sense of Confucianism, the regard for the sacredness of 
life and death found in the religion of Egypt, the worship 
of law, order, and justice found in that of Rome, the 
adoration of beauty, strength, and wisdom of Greece, 


100 Evo.uTion AND RELIGION 


the respect paid to freedom and courage in the old 
Norse Eddas, and last, and highest of all, the lofty 
spirit of renunciation which is the crowning glory of 
Buddhism and of higher Israel. In a word, it is the 
highest type in the evolution of religion, inasmuch as 
it has taken and gathered up into itself all the per- 
fections of the other religions of the world. 


Tur Minn or Curist 


The truth of the foregoing will, I believe, be made 
plain to you as you come to study more and more 
Christ’s own words; but I must warn you, in closing 
this study of evolutionary ideals, that by the teachings 
of Jesus I do not mean many of the theological dogmas 
which have been developed since his day, nor the actual 
practise of some of his so-called churches of to-day. 
They would seem to resemble more the tenets and 
practise of the Jewish church of his time, against whose 
abuses he so strongly inveighed. Scarcely one of the 
invectives which he launched against that church 
might not apparently be equally launched against 
many of our modern so-called Christian churches. 
To understand fully his teaching we must strive to 
enter into the mind of Christ, to have in our minds the 
same ideas which he had in his mind, when he spoke 
of God, sons of God, the Father, the Holy Spirit or 
Comforter, the kingdom of heaven on earth, repentance 
unto life, the new birth, righteousness, judgment, life 
eternal. To enter into the mind of Christ is not easy. 
If you desire proof of this, consider how often his 


Tue Minp or Caurist 101 


church, composed of thoroughly sincere men, has 
wandered away from the simplicity and breadth of his 
teaching. His words have so often been covered with the 
gloss of false interpretation, laid over the tropes and 
allegories of language which he used, that it is difficult 
to-day to wrest them back to their primal simple mean- 
ing. But the core of Christianity lies not in any accre- 
tions of interpretation or belief wherewith a naive, 
childlike faith may since have overlaid it. It consists 
in the embodied ideal of love, the Life, that was lived 
on this earth two thousand years ago; and in the trans- 
figuring power of that Life, not only over humble: 
fisher-folk at the time as witnessed in the marvelous 
letters and sayings of the apostles, but over the life of 
every human being who has since come into the world 
and been willing to listen attentively, modestly, and 
appreciatively to the story of that Life. 


* Love comes from God; and all who love are begotten of God 
and are learning to know him. ‘Those who do not love have not 
learnt to know God; for God is love. No human eyes have ever 
seen God; yet if we love one another, God is living in union with 
us, and his love attains its perfection in us. We may know that 
we are living in union with him, and he with us, by this — by his 
having given us some measure of his spirit” (of love). ‘If a man 
says that he loves God, and yet hates his brother, he is a liar; for 
if a man does not love his brother whom he has seen, he cannot 
possibly love God whom he has not seen. If any one has worldly 
possessions, and yet looks on while his brother is in want, and steels 
his heart against him, how can it be-true of him that he has the 
love of God within him? My children, do not let our love be 
mere words, or end in talk; let it be real and true.” 


—He who best knew the mind of the Master,— John, the 
beloved disciple: Twentieth Century New Testament. 


BL Trumbull, William 
263 Evolution and religion 


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