phase of evolutionism at present, is
nothing less than the basest and most horrible of superstitions. It
makes man not merely carnal but devilish. It takes his lowest appetites
and propensities, and makes them his God and Creator. His higher
sentiments and aspirations, his self-denying philanthropy, his
enthusiasm for the good and true, all the struggles and sufferings of
heroes and martyrs, not to speak of that self-sacrifice which is the
foundation of Christianity, are, in the view of the evolutionist, mere
loss and waste, failure in the struggle of life. What does he give us in
exchange? An endless pedigree of bestial ancestors, without one gleam of
high and holy tradition to enliven the procession; and for the future,
the prospect that the poor mass of protoplasm, which constitutes the sum
of our being, and which is the sole gain of an indefinite struggle in
the past, must soon be resolved again into inferior animals or dead
matter. That men of thought and culture should advocate such a
philosophy, argues either a strange mental hallucination, or that the
higher spiritual nature has been wholly quenched within them. It is one
of the saddest of many sad spectacles which our age presents." (p. 395)

FOOTNOTE:

[39] _The Story of Earth and Man_. By J. W. Dawson, LL. D., F. R. S., F.
G. S., Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University, Montreal.
Author of _Archaia, Acadian Geology_, etc. Second edition. London, 1873,
pp. 397.

_Relation of Darwinism to Religion._

The consideration of that subject would lead into the wide field of the
relation between science and religion. Into that field we lack
competency and time to enter; a few remarks, however, on the subject
may not be out of place. Those remarks, we would fain make in a humble
way irenical. There is need of an Irenicum, for the fact is painfully
notorious that there is an antagonism between scientific men as a class,
and religious men as a class. Of course this opposition is neither felt
nor expressed by all on either side. Nevertheless, whatever may be the
cause of this antagonism, or whoever are to be blamed for it, there can
be no doubt that it exists and that it is an evil.

The first cause of the alienation in question is, that the two parties,
so to speak, adopt different rules of evidence, and thus can hardly
avoid arriving at different conclusions. To understand this we must
determine what is meant by science, and by scientific evidence. Scie