Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/283

Rh upon religion, as a statue stands upon its pedestal. Morality and religion have grown up together, supernatural beliefs being mixed with ethical ideas as with everything else. Astronomy was mixed up with religion in the astrological periods. Chemistry was mixed up with religion in early times when the alchemist always began his experiments with prayer. But who would say that astronomy and chemistry were based upon religion? In the progressive differentiations of knowledge they have become freed from superstitions, and are now independent branches of science. Morals is later in its separation, but it must follow the same law, and become also an independent branch of science. But in these past interactions Professor Smith does not tell us to what extent religious superstitions have corrupted morality and hindered its development; nor does he intimate to what extent the life of such superstitions may have been prolonged by the conservative influence of their accompanying codes of morals.

But the Professor comes to closer quarters with his subject when he asserts that the moral debasement resulting from change of religious belief is a matter of fact, and already upon us. Religion has succumbed, and its place is taken by materialism, agnosticism, and evolution. A frightful catalogue of public crimes is made out and charged upon evolution. His curious logic here is, that evolution involves the conception of force, and therefore represents the execrable doctrines of brute force, outrage, and violence in human affairs. He says: "The worship of success signally exemplified in the adoration of a character such as that of Napoleon seems to be the morality of evolution supplanting that of Christianity." The "seeming" is here quite illusive. Evolutionists as a class are neither worshipers of success nor adorers of Napoleon. The parties addicted to these practices will be found in the opposite camp. The most signal and representative example of this adoration that we know was that of a Christian clergyman, the Rev. John S. C. Abbott, who wrote the life of Bonaparte in a strain of extravagant eulogy, and found hundreds of thousands of Christian readers who shared the admiration of the reverend author for his hero. It was not in the school of evolution that Abbott and his multitudinous readers were trained to the worship of brutal military success.

Mr. Smith cites the barbaric policy of England in the treatment of inferior races, the Zulu and Afghan wars, and the English sympathy with the slave power during the American civil war, as further illustrations of that ascendancy of brutality which he considers due to the present prevalence of evolutionary doctrine. The proposition is preposterous. The worship of success and the practice of national atrocities upon inferior races are not things of yesterday. They belong to the historic policy of Christian peoples. Afghan and Zulu wars are not novelties in English experience. Many in England may have sympathized with the slaveholders in our war, but what of the history of the slave system itself in relation to religion and morality? Were the negroes stolen and enslaved by evolutionists or Christians? Did religion abolish or nourish that stupendous immorality during the two centuries of its growth? Did not religion through its organizations lend itself to the perpetuation of this "sum of all villainies," which was only at last brought to an end solely by the indiscretion of its partisans, who went a little too for, and thus brought on the horrors of a fratricidal war?

And as to war itself, the subversion of all morality and the very revel of brute force, has it not ever been the pastime of religious nations? And do regiments ever want for chaplains to bless their brutal and bloody vocation?

Professor Smith further illustrates the ascendancy of brute-force ideas in