Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/196

182 God's Kingdom, where "the last shall be first and the first last;"—or by "having all things in common," say the Apostles in all the ardour of primitive Christianity, and later on certain religious communities;—or by the giving of alms and other charitable acts, says the Christianity of the middle ages;—while socialism maintains that this may be effected by reforms in the laws regulating the division of property. On the other hand, political economy and evolutionary sociology teach us that these miseries are the inevitable and beneficent consequences of natural laws; that these laws, being necessary conditions of progress, any endeavour to do away with them would be to disturb the order of nature and delay the dawn of better things. By "the weeding out of the sickly and infirm," and the survival of the fittest, the process of amelioration of species in the animal kingdom is accomplished. This law of natural selection should be allowed free and ample scope in human society. "Society is not a manufacture, but a growth." Might is really right, for it is to the general interest that the mighty should triumph and perpetuate the race. Thus argues what is now called Science.

In a book entitled "The True History of Joshua Davidson," the author places ideal Christianity and contemporary society face to face, and shows very clearly the opposition which exists between the doctrines of would-be science and those of the Gospel:—

"If the dogmas of political economy are really exact, if the laws of the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest must really be applied to human society, as well as to plants and animals, then let us at once admit that Christianity, which gives assistance to the poor and needy, and which stretches out a hand to the sinner, is a mere folly; and let us at once abandon a belief which influences neither our political institutions nor our social arrangements, and which ought not to influence them. If Christ was right, then our present Christianity is wrong, and if sociology really contains scientific truth, then Jesus of Nazareth spoke and acted in vain, or rather He rebelled against the immutable laws of nature." (Tauchnitz edition, p. 252.)

Mr. William Graham, in his "Creed of Science" (p. 278), writes as follows:—

"This great and far-reaching controversy, the most important in the history of our species, which is probably as old as human society itself, and certainly as old as the 'Republic' of Plato, in which it is discussed, or as Christianity, which began with a communistic form of society, had yet only within the past half century come to be felt as a controversy involving real and living issues of a momentous character, and not Utopias only remotely bordering upon the possible."

I think it may be proved that this so-called "doctrine of science" is contrary to facts, and is, consequently, not scientific; whereas the creed of Christianity is in keeping with both present facts and ideal humanity.

Darwin borrowed his idea of the struggle for existence and the