Page:The World's Most Famous Court Trial - 1925.djvu/341

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SUPPLEMENT-BRYAN ON EVOLUTION
337

out until the blood is purified. One of the leading universities of the South (I love the state too well to mention its name) publishes a monthly magazine entitled "Journal of Social Forces." In the January issue of this year, a contributor has a lengthy article on "Sociology and Ethics," in the course of which he says:

"No attempt will be made to take up the matter of the good or evil of sexual intercourse among humans aside from the matter of conscious procreation, but as an historian, it might be worth while to ask the exponents of the impurity complex to explain the fact that, without exception, the great periods of cultural efflorescence have been those characterized by a large amount of freedom in sex-relations, and that those of the greatest cultural degradation and decline have been accompanied with greater sex repression and purity."

No one charges or suspects that all or any large percentage of the advocates of evolution sympathize with this loathsome application of evolution to social life, but it is worthwhile to inquire why those in charge of a great institution of learning allow such filth to be poured out for the stirring of the passions of its students.

Just one more quotation: The Southeastern Christian Advocate of June 25, 1925, quotes five eminent college men of Great Britain as joining in an answer to the question, "Will civilization survive?" Their reply is that:

"The greatest danger menacing our civilization is the abuse of the achievements of science. Mastery over the forces of nature has endowed the twentieth century man with a power which he is not fit to exercise. Unless the development of morality catches up with the development of technique, humanity is bound to destroy itself."

Can any Christian remain indifferent? Science needs religion to direct its energies and to inspire with lofty purpose those who employ the forces that are unloosened.

The idea seemed to present the whole order of progress in the world as the result of a purely mechanical and materialistic process resting on force. In so doing it was a conception which reached the springs of that heredity born of the unmeasured ages of conquest out of which the western mind has come. Within half a century the origin of species had become the Bible of the doctrine of the omnipotence of force."

Kidd goes so far as to charge that "Nietzsche's teaching represented the interpretation of the popular Darwinism delivered with the fury and intensity of genius." And Nietzsche, be it remembered, denounced Christianity as the "doctrine of the degenerate," and democracy as "the refuge of weaklings."

Kidd says that Nietzsche gave Germany the doctrine of Darwin's efficient animal in the voice of his superman, and that Bernhardi and the military textbooks in due time gave Germany the doctrine of the superman translated into the national policy of the superstate aiming at world power. (Page 67.)

And what else but the spirit of evolution can account for the popularity of the selfish doctrine, "Each one for himself, and the devil take the hindmost," that threatens the very existence of the doctrine of brotherhood.

In 1900—twenty-five years ago—while an international peace congress was in session in Paris, the following editorial appeared in L'Univers:

"The spirit of peace has fled the earth because evolution has taken possession of it. The plea for peace in past years has been inspired by faith in the divine nature and the divine origin of man; men were then looked upon as children of one Father, and war, therefore, was fratricide. But now that men are looked upon as children of apes, what matters it whether they are slaughtered or not?"

When there is poison in the blood, no one knows on what part of the body it will break out, but we can be sure that it will continue to break