ed upon the world, moral
principle appeared, and the angel of benevolence and love became
enshrined in the human breast. Step by step this favored being, the
ideal of natural selection in all her plans, advanced to a stage in
which it became incumbent to even subordinate self to the good of
others, not only to spare the weak but to tenderly care for them, and
even to love those who have treated him with unkindness and abuse. While
in the early stages the law of life and progress had been the sacrifice
of others for selfish good; now the crowning glory consists in
self-sacrifice for the good of all but self.

The logical result of this reasoning cannot escape the notice of any who
carefully consider it. If, for any reason, any community of human beings
should decline in moral and intellectual character until they should
finally reach the original state of savagery, it would again become
their duty to lay aside all high ethical claims as no longer suited to
their condition. The extraneous complications which had grown out of
mere social order having passed away, rectitude also would pass away;
benevolence, philanthropy, humanity, would be wholly out of place, and
however lovely Christian charity might appear from a sentimental point
of view, it would be ill adapted to that condition of society. In such a
state of things the strong and vigorous, if sacrificing themselves to
the weak, would only perpetuate weakness, and it would be their duty
rather to extirpate them, and by the survival only of the fittest to
regain the higher civilization. I state the case in all its naked
deformity, because it shows the confusion and darkness of a world in
which God is not the moral centre.

And here, as already stated, modern speculation joins hands with the old
heathen systems. According to Hindu as well as Buddhist philosophy, this
retrograde process might not only carry civilized man back to savagery,
but might place him again in the category of brutes. If tendencies
control all things and have no limit, why might they not remand the
human being to lower and lower forms, until he should reach again the
status of the mollusk?

Now, over against all the systems which make mind either a product or a
phenomenon of matter, we have the Scriptural doctrine that man was
created in the image of God. This fact explains the differences which
distinguish him from the beasts of the field; for even in his lowest
estate he is amenable to the pri