these writers had so sophisticated their
own minds that they have ceased to understand the fundamental,
world-wide difference between right and gain, between duty and pleasure.
"Do justice, though the heavens fall," could never be evolved by Natural
Selection. That is the law of the sharpest tooth, and the longest claws,
and the biggest bull; the Napoleonic theology, whose god is always on
the side of the strongest battalions; the law of the perdition of the
weak, and the survival of the strongest. In obedience to its laws the
birds forsake their parents as soon as they can shift for themselves;
the herd tramples down the wounded deer; the wolves devour their wounded
brothers; the queen bee puts her sisters to death, and the neuters
sacrifice all the males of the hive. In obedience to the laws of Natural
Selection, the males fight for the most attractive females, and keep as
many as they can, and form societies on that basis.

But man has a sense of justice, and mercy, and gratitude, and love. Here
is an animal who knows he ought to tell truth, and do right, and honor
his parents, and respect and love his brethren. Whether he always does
his duty or not, he feels and owns he ought to do it. Justice, and
mercy, and the fear of God, are not at all the attributes of brutes, and
never could have been produced by the evolution of their instincts. No
animal possesses any knowledge of God, nor practices any form of
religious worship. Religion, then, could not be the evolution of what
has no existence.

We have now considered the theory of the atheistical evolution of man,
and of all plants and animals from one primeval germ, by the
unintelligent operation of the powers of nature. We have seen that there
are as many contradictory applications of the theory as there are
advocates of it; that in any shape it is incoherent, illogical, and
absurd; that it is destitute of any support from facts; that the alleged
analogy of embryology fails to give it countenance; that the order of
nature in its gradations is contradictory of the theory; that it utterly
fails to account for the origin of life, for the distinctness of the
four classes of the animal kingdom, for the distinctness of species
which refuse to breed together, for the absence of the intermediate
forms necessary to the theory; and, above all, that it can give no
satisfactory account of man's bodily, mental, and moral superiority to
all other animals, nor for his possession