No Refuge but in Truth | Page 5

and national,

will be produced; a variety ranging from the highest human grandeur
down to the very verge of the grotesque. But these characters, with all
their variations, will go beyond their sources and their ideal only as the
rays of light go beyond the sun. Humanity, as it passes through phase
after phase of the historical movement, may advance indefinitely in
excellence; but its advance will be an indefinite approximation to the
Christian type. A divergence from that type, to whatever extent it may
take place, will not be progress, but debasement and corruption. In a
moral point of view, in short, the world may abandon Christianity, but
it can never advance beyond it. This is not a matter of authority, or
even of revelation. If it is true, it is a matter of reason as much as
anything in the world."
I went on to dwell on the freedom of the Christian type of character as
embodied in the Founder of Christianity from peculiarities of nation,
race, or sex which might have derogated from its perfection as a type of
pure humanity. In those days I believed in revelation. But my argument
was not from revelation, but from ethics and history. The undertaking
of Christianity to convert mankind to a fraternal and purely beneficent
type of character and enfold men in a universal brotherhood, baffled
and perverted although the effort has been in various ways, appears to
have no parallel in ethical history. There is none in the Greek
philosophers or the Roman Stoics, high as some of them may soar in
their way. Aristotle's ideal man is perfect in its statuesque fashion, but
it is not fraternal; it is not even philanthropic. Nor does the Christian
character or the effort to create it depart with belief in dogma. Do not
men who have totally renounced the dogma still cultivate a character in
its gentleness and benevolence essentially Christian?
Theory, I have none. I plead, on a footing with the nine thousand
correspondents of the Daily Telegraph of London, for thoroughgoing
allegiance to the truth, emancipation of the clerical intellect from tests,
and comprehension in the inquiry not only of the material, but of the
higher or spiritual nature of man, including his aspiration to progress,
of which there cannot be said to be any visible sign in brutes, whatever
rudiments of human faculties and affections they may otherwise
display. But though I have no theory, I cannot help having a conception,

and my present conception of the historical relation of Christianity and
its Founder to humanity and human progress does not seem to me to be
so different from what it was half a century ago as when I came to
compare the two I expected to find it. It seems to me still that history is
a vast struggle, with varying success, toward the attainment of moral
perfection, of which, if the advent of Christianity furnished the true
ideal, it may be deemed in a certain sense a revelation. Assuredly it
may if in this most mysterious world there is, beneath all the conflict of
good with evil, a spirit striving toward good and destined in the end to
prevail. If there is not such a spirit, if all is matter and chance, we, can
only say, What a spectacle is History!
January 20th, 1907.

III.
THE SCOPE OF EVOLUTION.
In discussing the ground of ethical science some writers appear to hold
that evolution explains all; but surely the illustrious discoverer of
evolution never carried his theory beyond the material part of man. He
never professed to trace the birth of ethics, idealization, science, poetry,
art, religion, or anything spiritual in the anthropoid ape. There is here,
apparently, not only a step in development but a saltus mortalis, a
dividing and impassable gulf.
Our bodily senses we share with the brutes. Some brutes excel us in
quickness of sense. They have the rudiments, but the rudiments only, of
our emotions and affections. The mother bird loves her offspring, but
only until they are fledged. The dog is attached to the master who feeds
him, commands him, and if he offends whips him; but without respect
to that master's personal character or deserts. He is as much attached to
Bill Sykes as he would be to the best of men. The workings of what we
call instinct in beavers, bees, and ants are marvellous and seem in some
ways almost to outstrip humanity, but they are not, like humanity,
progressive. The ant and the bee of thousands of years ago are the ant

and the bee of the present day. The bee is not even taught by experience
that her honey will be taken again next year. Still less is it possible to
detect anything like moral aspiration or