n the subject, entitled "The Religion of Evolution." Mr. Savage
is a very pronounced evolutionist; he sticks at nothing in the most
extravagant form of the new theory, and the attitude which he would take
toward religion is clearly shown in the title of his previous volume on
a kindred subject, "Christianity the Science of Manhood." It is safe to
say that although Mr. Savage and others like him may call themselves
Christians and believe themselves to be so, and may live lives worthy of
the name, no man who twenty-five years ago was a professed believer in
the Christian religion, and comparatively very few of those who are so
now, would accept the term _science_ as applicable to Christianity or to
religion at all. For science means knowledge, knowledge of facts, and
cautious logical deductions from those facts; whereas the very essence
of religion is a faith which holds itself above knowledge and reason, a
faith which is not only the substance of things hoped for, but the
evidence of things not seen. And this great definition, one of the
greatest ever given, applies not particularly to the faith of the
Christian religion, but to all faiths--Judaism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism,
and the rest. The true religionist will sooner accept one of these as a
religion than a religion of evolution, or than he will consent to accept
Christianity as a science of anything--of manhood, or even of God-hood.

--It is with this view of religion, this feeling about it, that the
evolutionists have to deal when they endeavor to free themselves from
the charge of irreligion. This is a state of the case which some of them
do not seem to appreciate at its full importance. They shirk it, or at
least they slight it; but Mr. Savage, it must be admitted, meets it
fairly and boldly. He takes the position that such a view of religion is
unworthy of a reasonable creature, and he brushes it aside with little
ceremony and with some dexterity. But his chief difficulty is with the
conception which lies at the foundation of all religions--the idea of
god. Granted a god, or gods, and religion follows as a matter of course;
and conversely, no god, no religion. Therefore the evolutionists, those
of them who feel, or who see the necessity of a religion, of whom Mr.
Savage may be taken as a fair representative, go about to provide
themselves and the rest of the universe with a god, and they do it in
this fashion. It is shown to the satisfaction of the evolutionists, a