The present economic system is being rapidly outgrown. Man’s increasing intelligence, sense of justice, and the humanitarian spirit of the age, demand radical changes, which will come immeasurably nearer securing equal opportunities for all persons than the past dreamed possible. No sudden or rash measure calculated to convulse business and work great suffering should be entertained, but our future action should rest on a broad, settled policy founded upon justice, tempered by moderation, keeping in view the great work of banishing uninvited poverty, and elevating to a higher level the great struggling millions without for a moment sacrificing individualism. Indeed, a truer democracy in which a higher interpretation of justice, and a broader conception of individual freedom, and a more sacred regard for liberty, should be the watchword of the future.
EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY.
BY PROF. JAS. T. BIXBY, PH. D.
In the life and letters of Charles Darwin there is a memorandum, copied from his pocket note-book of 1837, to this effect:—“In July, opened first notebook on Transmutation of Species. Had been greatly struck with the character of the South American fossils and the species on Galapagos Archipelago.”
These facts, he says, were the origin of all his epoch-making views as to the development of life and the work of natural selection in evolving species.
His suspicions that species were not immutable and made at one cast, directly by the fiat of the Creator, seemed to him, at first, he says, almost like murder.
To the greater part of the church, when in 1859, after twenty years of work in accumulating the proofs of his theory, he at last gave it to the world, it seemed quite as bad as murder.