most perfect man there is simply a development of the functions and attributes of the lowest organism, the amoeba. The observation of this universal fact of continuity-that nothing anywhere comes from nothing-constitutes the strongest philosophical proof of Evolution.

Let us note some of the convincing proofs of Evolution in the field of Sociology. Professor Clifford says, the selfhood of the tribe is of more importance than that of the individual. In animals that were gregarious the chances of survival were greater than in those which were not. Slavery, in the evolution of morals, was an advance upon cannibalism; it at first was prudential, then it became immoral to kill in cold blood. The influence of environment upon morals is seen in negro slavery in our own country. In the North, where slavery was unprofitable, its ethical wrong was. earlier seen than in the South, where the institution was of advantage to the slave-owners. Again, in the North the moral perception was manifested in denunciations of the inhumanity of the practice of slave-holding; in the South, in the kind treatment of the slave. Now even the slave-holder has discovered that slavery was both economically unprofitable and morally wrong; and slavery is universally condemned, because it has been proved to be unsuited to its environment. With the decline of the ancient tribal fealty, and the sense of personal comradeship, comes in the feeling of a wider relationship, of a universal brotherhood. In some communities, however, the fact of brotherhood and equality of rights is perceived subjectively before the functional development of the masses renders its legal establishment practicable or possi-ble. Hence arise conflicts and political dissensions. A sudden change in environment, for which the subject is not prepared, results disastrously. Thus the North American Indian, in common with other savage races, was not prepared for the additional leisure which the improved implements of warfare furnished by the whites gave him, which enabled him to procure subsistence in half the time which had formerly been required, and left him without. sufficient occupation, while, to make a bad matter worse, the white man's stimulants came in to fill the gap. He was not prepared to use the advantages of civilization, which were suited to the condition of the white man because he had evolved them. There was a break in the continuity. Without occupation, man reverts to his original barbarous condition, as seen in the sports which engage the attention of the wealthy idlers among us, of which horse-racing and fox-hunting are illustrations.

EVOLUTION AS RELATED TO RELIGIOUS THOUGHT

BY

JOHN W. CHADWICK

AUTHOR OF "THE BIBLE OF TO-DAY," "THE FAITH OF REASON," "CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN," ETC., ETC.

COLLATERAL READINGS SUGGESTED

IN CONNECTION WITH ESSAY XIII.

Spencer's Sociology and Discussion with Frederic Harrison; Max Muller's Science of Religion; Powell's Our Heredity from God; Fiske's Cosmic Philosophy, Unseen World, Destiny of Man, and Idea of God; Abbot's Scientific Theism; Le Conte's Erolution and its Relation to Religious Thought; Dr. McCosh's The Religious Aspects of Erolution; Mivart's Lessons from Nature as Manifested in Mind and Matter; Martineau's A Study of Religion; Stewart and Tait's Unseen Universe; Clifford's Unseen Universe (in Lectures and Essays); M. F. Force's Darwinism and Deity; W. Stanley Jevons' Evolution and the Doctrine of Design (in Popular Science Monthly, May, 1874); Professor Youman's Spencer's Reconciliation of Science and Region (in Christian Examiner, May, 1862); Conder's Natural Selection and Natural Theology; Strauss's Old Faith and the New; Darwinism and the Christian Faith (in Popular Science Monthly, May and June, 1888).

EVOLUTION AS RELATED TO RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.*

I APPRECIATE the kindness of the Ethical Association in allowing me the first word and the last on the most seriously interesting topic of the present course of lectures and discussions. The embarrassment of riches it entails has been considerably lessened by two preceding lecturesMr. Sampson's on the Evolution of Theology and Dr. Janes's on the Evolution of Ethics. From this precedence it will appear that I am not expected to treat of the Evolution of Religion but of Evolution and Religion, i. e., of Religion as affected by the doctrine of Evolution. My talk would be still further circumscribed, in fact my occupation would be entirely gone, if Ethics were, as some insist, all there is of Religion; for Dr. Janes added to his treatment of the Evolution of Ethics some treatment of the standing of Religion ethically considered in the light of Evolution. But the ethical exhaustion of religion I cannot by any means allow. I believe that "Ethics thought out is religious thought; Ethics felt out is religious feeling; Ethics lived out is religious life"; but so thought out, felt out, lived out, it is not the only religious thought, feeling and life that are possible for us. Ethics is part and parcel of Religion only by historical adoption, and the tendency of "all thoughts, all passions, all delights" in the last analysis to lose themselves in God. If we were of those who insist upon the limitation of terms to their original significance, we should insist upon the absolute difference and separateness of Ethics and Religion, for the reason that in their original characters they were different and separate. The first Religion was not ethical; the first Ethics was not religious. These streams of thought and feeling were like two rivers, say the Mississippi and Missouri, rising in different upland tracts, but at last uniting into one rejoicing flood. It is oftentimes about as difficult to distinguish Ethics and Religion in the blended flood with which we * COPYRIGHT, 1889, by The New Ideal Publishing Co.

sweep along, as it is to distinguish the waters of the Mississippi and Missouri below their uniting place. It has often been insisted that the Missouri is the continuous river, the Mississippi the tributary; that the present naming has no justification in physical geography. If one should contend that Ethics is the main, Religion the tributary stream, I think it would not be very difficult to make this contention good. But those who insist that Ethics is exhaustive of Religion and is entitled to the name are precisely in the fix of an imaginary person who should declare that so much of the united flood of the Mississippi and Missouri as the Missouri furnishes should be called the Mississippi and the rest should be ignored.

You will agree with me that these are vain and fruitless speculations. The positive method is the best. Religion, as it now is in the world, is a flood of many waters. Into it Ethics has poured its vast Missouri, man's sense of his relation to the universe and its controlling powers its Mississippi (perhaps this as the more stained and turbulent had better have the other name), and man's engagement with the idea of a future life its immense Ohio. Religion as it is at present constituted in the world is composed, with emphases that vary with its different sects and schisms, of these three elements: Men's thought and feeling about God, about Immortality, and about the Moral Law, and of their action determined by such thought and feeling. If as I go on I treat almost exclusively of the relations of doctrinal evolution to the ideas of God and Immortality, it will be from no comparative disrespect for Ethics, but because where Dr. Janes has reaped I do not care to glean.

The evolutionist need never have had any fear that if he could establish his doctrine, if he could win for it the consensus of the competent among scientists, the organized religion, even the orthodoxy of the time, would find it perfectly harmless, would indeed insist that the Bible taught it. How like to Emerson's

"And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form,”

is the New Testament verse, "The earnest expectation of the creation longeth for the manifestation of the sons of God." Only it must be confessed that nobody ever suspected any Evolutionism in this till Evolutionism had been