a higher grade of life, seek
the lower as an end in itself, and not simply so far as it is a
condition of the higher and no further. The Gospel precept, as usual,
enunciates only the law of reason and nature, when it bids us to "Seek
first the Kingdom of God and its justice," that is, to put our best life
in the front, and to make it the measure and limit of any other quest.
The neglect of this principle gives us high living and plain thinking,
instead of "high thinking and plain living;" and takes the bread out of
the mouths of the poor. The competition for pleasures and luxuries and
amusements, may indeed develop certain industries and cause progress in
certain narrow lines, but it is at the cost of the only progress worth
the name.

The conflict between this "struggle-theory" and ethics has been freely
acknowledged by Professor Huxley and others; every attempt to educe
unselfishness from selfishness has failed. The moral man even in our day
has rather a bad time of it; what chance would he have had of surviving
to propagate his species in the supposed pre-moral states of human
society? Who can possibly conceive mere rottenness being cured by
progress in rottenness; or a man drinking himself into temperance? On
the other hand, it is at least conceivable that in the wildest savage
there is some little seed of a moral sense--weak, compared with the
lowest springs of action, just because it is the highest and therefore
only struggling into being; and that in the slow lapse of time events
may here and there prove that honesty is the best policy; and that
honesty once tasted may be found not only useful for other things, but
agreeable for itself, and may be cherished and strengthened by social
and religious sanctions.

There is, however, a reaction on foot which tends to reconcile the
breach between ethics and evolution, by reducing the part played by
competition within reasonable bounds, and making it subservient to the
survival, not of the most selfish, but of the most social individuals.
Definite variations from within, modified between narrow limits by
accidental variation from without, is coming to be acknowledged as the
chief factor of progress. But we should not forget that to allow an
internal principle of orderly development is, not merely to modify the
popular evolution theory by a slight concession to its adversaries; it
is rather to make it no longer the supreme explanation of development,
but at most a sligh