Again, it may be objected that evolutionists, for all their agnosticism and materialism, frequently put Christians to shame by their irreproachably upright and moral lives. That they sometimes succeed in doing this cannot be gainsaid. But they do so because they borrow their moral standards from Christianity, and do not follow the logical consequences of their own principles. Their morality, therefore, is parasitic, as Balfour has wisely observed, and it will soon die out when the social environment shall have been sufficiently de-Christianized. “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” is their proper philosophy of life, only they have not the courage of their convictions. For the rest, their philosophical convictions have nothing in common with the moral standards which they actually observe. In fact, not only does the monism of evolutionary science fail to motivate the Christian code of morals, but it is radically and irreconcilably opposed to all that Christianity stands for. Hartmann, a modern philosopher, notes with grim satisfaction the clash of the two viewpoints, and predicts (with what, perhaps, is premature assurance) the ultimate triumph of “modern progress.” “Many there are,” he tells us, “who speak and write of the struggle of civilization, but few there are who realize that this struggle is the last desperate stand of the Christian ideal before its final disappearance from the world, and that modern civilization is prepared to resort to any means rather than relinquish those things, which it has won at the cost of such great toil. For modern civilization and Christianity are antagonistic to each other, and it is therefore inevitable that one give place to the other. Modern progress can acknowledge no God save one immanent to the world and opposed to the transcendent God of Christian revelation, nor other morality save only that true kind whose source is the human will determining itself by itself and becoming a law unto itself.” (“Religion de l’avernir.”)
The World War has done much to dampen the ardor of those who looked forward with enthusiasm to the millennium of a purely scientific religion. In this spectacular lesson they have learned that science can destroy as well as build. They have come to see that biology, physics, and chemistry are morally colorless, and that we must go outside the realm of natural science when we are in quest of that which can give meaning to our lives and noble inspiration to our conduct. When science supersedes religion, the result is always disillusionment following in the wreck-strewn wake of moral and physical disaster.
Grave little manikins digging in the slime
Intent upon the old game of ‘Once-upon-a-time.’
Other little manikins engaged with things-to-come,
Building up the sand-heap called Millennium.
(Theodore MacManus)
Recently, the chancellor of a great university has seen fit publicly to disclaim, in the name of his institution, all responsibility for a crime committed by two members of the student body. The young men involved in this affair had performed an experimental murder. The experimenters, it would seem, were unable to discriminate between man and beast. They had been taught by their professors that scientific psychology dispenses with the soul, and that the difference between men and brutes is one of degree only, and not of kind. Even that negligible distinction, they were told, had been bridged by evolution. In the sequel, the young men failed, apparently, to see why vivisection, which was right in the case of animals, should be wrong in the case of human beings. Their astounding obtuseness on this particular point was, of course, exceedingly regrettable and hard to understand. Yet, somehow, one cannot help thinking but that their education was largely responsible for it.
In the startling crime of these students, modern educators will find much food for serious thought. It should give pause to those, especially, who have been overzealous in popularizing the Darwinian conception of human nature. Let men of this type reflect upon what slender grounds their dogmatism rests, and let them then weigh well the gravity of the responsibility, which they incur. Tuccimei summarizes for them, in the following terms, the nature and extent of their accountability:
“This perverse determination to place man and brutes in the same category, interests me not so much from the scriptural standpoint as for reasons moral and social. Science, as the more moderate of our adversaries have told us often enough, does not assail religion, but proceeds on its way regardless of the consequences. And the consequences we see only too plainly, now that the evolutionary philosophy has invaded every branch of knowledge and walk of life, and has seeped down among the ignorant and turbulent masses. These consequences are known as socialism and anarchy. The protagonists of the new philosophy strove to repudiate them at first: but now many of their number have laid aside even this pretense. Socialistic doctrines are based exclusively upon our assumed kinship with the brutes, and the leaders of militant socialism have inscribed on the frontispieces of their books the chain fatally logical and terribly true of three names, Darwin, Spencer, Marx.