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RELIGION AND MORALITY

because the meaning of his life is only to be found in the accomplishment of the Will of Him that sent Mm, and that the Will of Him that sent him is—that he should give his life to the service of mankind. And such a modification in man's perception of his relation to the universe is wrought only by religion.

So, too, is it with the attempts to deduce Christian morality from, and to harmonise it with, the fundamental propositions of pagan science. No sophisms nor mental shifting will destroy the simple and clear proposition, that the hypothesis of evolution, laid as the basis of all the science of our time, is founded upon a general, unchangeable, and eternal law—that of the struggle for existence, and of the survival of the "fittest"—and that, therefore, every man, for the attainment of his own welfare, or of that of his society, must be this fittest, or make his society the fittest, in order that neither he nor his society should perish, but another less fit. However much some naturalists, alarmed by the logical inferences of this law, and by its adaptation to human existence, may strive to extinguish it with words and talk it down, its irrefutability becomes only the more manifest by their efforts, and its control over the life of the entire organic world, and hence over that of man, regarded as an animal.

While I am writing this,[1] the Russian translation of an article by Professor

  1. 1894