No Refuge but in Truth | Page 5

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 effort at improving the community in a moral way. Beavers are wonderfully co-operative, but they have shown no tendency to establish a church.
Of the science of ethics the foundation surely is our sense of the difference between right and wrong, and of our obligation to choose the right and avoid the wrong for our own sake and for the sake of the society of which we are