u love your neighbour. Well? Love
ought to show itself in the removal of everything which in one way
or another is injurious to men and threatens them with danger in
the present or in the future. Our knowledge and the evidence tells
us that the morally and physically abnormal are a menace to humanity.
If so you must struggle against the abnormal; if you are not able
to raise them to the normal standard you must have strength and
ability to render them harmless--that is, to destroy them."

"So love consists in the strong overcoming the weak."

"Undoubtedly."

"But you know the strong crucified our Lord Jesus Christ," said the
deacon hotly.

"The fact is that those who crucified Him were not the strong but
the weak. Human culture weakens and strives to nullify the struggle
for existence and natural selection; hence the rapid advancement
of the weak and their predominance over the strong. Imagine that
you succeeded in instilling into bees humanitarian ideas in their
crude and elementary form. What would come of it? The drones who
ought to be killed would remain alive, would devour the honey, would
corrupt and stifle the bees, resulting in the predominance of the
weak over the strong and the degeneration of the latter. The same
process is taking place now with humanity; the weak are oppressing
the strong. Among savages untouched by civilisation the strongest,
cleverest, and most moral takes the lead; he is the chief and the
master. But we civilised men have crucified Christ, and we go on
crucifying Him, so there is something lacking in us. . . . And that
something one ought to raise up in ourselves, or there will be no
end to these errors."

"But what criterion have you to distinguish the strong from the
weak?"

"Knowledge and evidence. The tuberculous and the scrofulous are
recognised by their diseases, and the insane and the immoral by
their actions."

"But mistakes may be made!"

"Yes, but it's no use to be afraid of getting your feet wet when
you are threatened with the deluge!"

"That's philosophy," laughed the deacon.

"Not a bit of it. You are so corrupted by your seminary philosophy
that you want to see nothing but fog in everything. The abstract
studies with which your youthful head is stuffed are called abstract
just because they abstract your minds from what is obvious. Look
the devil straight in the eye, and if he's the devil, tell him he's
the devil, and don't go calling to Kant or Hegel for expl