eir principles could only be made
when a generation should appear upon which no influence of Christian
parents still remained, and in a society in which Christian sentiment
no longer survived.[191] It may be said that the _truth_ must be
received without regard to the results which may follow. This is
admitted, but the same cannot be said of _theories_. If there is
perfect harmony between all truths in the physical and the moral world,
then all these should have their influence in reaching final
conclusions.

4. The philosophies, ancient and modern, have agreed in lowering the
common estimate of man as man; they have exerted an influence the
opposite of that in which the New Testament pleads for a common and an
exalted brotherhood of the race.

Hinduism raised the Brahman almost to the dignity of the gods, and
debased the Sudra to a grade but a little higher than the brute. Buddha
declared that his teachings were for the wise, and not for the simple.
The philosophers of Greece and Rome, even the best of them, regarded
the helot and the slave as of an inferior grade of beings--even though
occasionally a slave by his superior force rose to a high degree. In
like manner the whole tendency of modern evolution is to degrade the
dignity and sacredness of humanity. It is searching for "missing links;"
it measures the skulls of degraded races for proofs of its theories. It
has travellers and adventurers on the lookout for tribes who have no
conception of God, and no religious rites; it searches caves and dredges
lakes for historical traces of man when he had but recently learned to
"stand upright upon his hind legs." The lower the types that can be
found, the more valuable are they for the purposes required. All this
tends to the dishonoring of the inferior types of men. Wherever
Christianity had changed the old estimates of the philosophers, and had
led to the nobler sentiment that God had made of one blood all nations
and races, and had stamped His own image on them all, and even redeemed
them all by the sacrifice of His Son, the speculations of sceptical
biology have in a measure counteracted its benign influence. They have
fostered the contempt of various classes for a dark skin or an inferior
civilization. They indirectly encourage those who, with little merit of
their own, speak contemptuously of the "Buck Indian," "the Nigger," the
"Heathen Chinee." They encourage the "hoodlum," and so far as they have
any influence, g